Error in Shockwave Player version 12.2.3.183

Report · Jan 13, 2016

Every time I visit a website with any type of ad on it, I get an error message that "Shockwave Flash may be busy or it may have stopped responding." If I click on "stop plugin" i get a warning across the top of my browser that "the Adobe Flash plugin has crashed." For the past few weeks it's been annoying because every time I try to view a new page, my entire browser (not just the tab in question) freezes up until the error message loads. It can take an entire minute to load a single page this way. But today, Firefox stops responding altogether when I try to load a page and I have to go to the Task Manager to kill it off. I'm now having the exact same problem in Internet Explorer.

I'm thoroughly confused, because I thought Flash was different from Shockwave Player, but all my Googling keeps leading me to the download page for Shockwave Player. So I went to Adobe's own Shockwave Player Help page. The first time, I clicked the yellow button to "see if I have Shockwave Player installed" and it said I did not. I actually checked to make sure I did, in fact, have it installed, and it was there, but I went through the whole process of installing it again anyway. Now it's telling me I don't have the latest version installed. Here's the kicker, though: It's telling me my version is 12.2.3.183 and the latest version is 12.1.9.159. Um...wouldn't 12.1.anything be older than 12.2.whatever? Regardless, I followed the steps to enable Shockwave Player in Firefox, and still the white box on the help page where you're supposed to see clouds, all I see is an empty white box with a "reload" arrow. Clicking the arrow does nothing. I also still have not solved my Flash crashing issue.

I'm using Windows Vista, Firefox version 43.0.4, Internet Explorer version 9, and Norton antivirus. I'm also having problems with Adobe Reader X "not responding" every single time I try to open PDF files (which is a real problem since I work in an office and I do a LOT of scanning and emailing), but if I wait 30-60 minutes (yes, I said minutes) I can usually view or print before it freezes up again. I'm never able to fill in forms, though; as soon as I click where I want the cursor to go, the program freezes up permanently and I have to use the Task Manager to close it.

Report · Jan 13, 2016

The current version of Adobe Flash Player NPAPI for Firefox is 20.0.0.267, and the latest ActiveX version for Internet Explorer is 20.0.0.270. I suggest that you uninstall your antique versions via Control Panel > Programs and Features, then go to Adobe Flash Player Install for all versions (once with Firefox, and once with IE if you actually use it). Deselect any optional software that you do not want and install.

Report · Jan 14, 2016

I did this, and the first time I went to the Flash Player website it still crashed. The second time I got the video to load of the red box bouncing, but I couldn't get any other website to load without the Flash Player crashing. Firefox suggested I uncheck "enable Flash in protected mode" as a sort of last-ditch effort. That solved the problem for 13 minutes and 2 web pages. They were slow, but they loaded. (One of them was Yahoo.com.) On the third page, the error was back and has been ever since.

Firefox's help page seems to think my antivirus software could be the problem, but it didn't update or change anything during the 13 minutes everything was working properly. For that matter, nothing else changed or updated, either. And just to be sure it wasn't an issue with specific websites, I went back to Yahoo.com, the first page that loaded correctly. I got the error when I went back the second time. I'm at a loss as to why this only happens some of the time.

Could there be something wrong with my computer that's just causing Adobe programs to load slowly? Firefox says I could be getting this error message because the player is slow to respond. I'm also having an issue with Adobe Reader hanging up for about an hour when I try to open a document (that discussion is here) and I wonder if they could be related. Oddly enough, I have no problems opening a PDF file from the web in Firefox.