Chrome manages Flash Player updates automatically, but they recently changed their update mechanism to exclusively use their component updater. Unfortunately, on some very small subset systems, the permissions are such that the component updater doesn't have permission to make the update. Google continues to identify and resolve issues on the component updater, but these problems to pop up from time to time.
Sometimes the actual Chrome installation gets damaged (the underlying filesystem or permissions get corrupted, etc), and that prevents an update, which is why recommend the reinstall as a solution, but there are a couple less destructive things we can now try because of the transition to component updater.
The first thing you should try is to manually force the component update.
Type this in the address bar:
chrome://components/
Under Adobe Flash Player, click the "Check For Update" box. If it updates, great. If not, that's a good indicator that the component updater can't update the files.
Chrome will now actually use the system PPAPI installation of Flash Player, if it's newer than the one that's built into Chrome, so you *can* download our installer, which includes it's own auto-updater, which should work consistently. For the sake of being precise, that means the copy in Chrome will remain stale because their component updater is unable to complete the update, but ours will supercede it, so it doesn't really matter.
Go to the Other Downloads page here, then choose Windows 7 and FP 2* - For Opera and Chromium - PPAPI
Adobe Flash Player Install for all versions
Finally, if you don't want to go that route, you *can* just remove and reinstall Chrome. If you're signed into a Google account, it should preserve most of your settings between installations anyway.
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