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Question

[locked] Flash player crashes all browsers

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
October 24, 2009
47 replies
65561 views

In the past few days Flash Player has crashed all the major browsers, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera 10, Safari, and Chrome. Windows XP 64-bit. If you want to witness the problem, go to http://www.canaan.jp/ and wait a few moments. I have sent in as many crash reports as the browsers were able to generate. I have also read so many entries in other forums that this problem is epidemic. You are probably already nearly panicking over it, and well you should. Your monopoly on streaming data is threatening to come crashing down around your ears. You'd better fix it quick or become accustomed to the sound of peasants banging their pitchforks against the gates and howling for your heads.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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ginnygirl23

New Participant

It’s amazing how all this dialogue is going on at Adobe’s “so called” support site and they have not addressed this issue. They are so arrogant. Like everyone, I am sick of wasting hours reinstalling. I followed Adobe’s instructions precisely. What I think would be a good idea is start letting the sites you visit that you can’t visit them anymore because of flash player. I already told Verizon that I can’t view or purchase ringtones or media. I also put a post on some YouTube/Google forum. When these big companies realize it’s gonna cost them lost visitors, maybe they’ll get on Adobe. Here’s a sample letter below if you want to copy and paste it. Also here’s the email address for 2 of Adobe’s Press Release persons. I’m going to keep emailing them too. It’s funny, when I started typing this and was up to the submit part, Internet Explore crashed on me. I hope this gets through.

DEAR SIR, PLEASE TELL ADOBE TO STOP BEING SO ARROGANT AND TAKE A PEAK AT THEIR SO CALLED “SUPPORT SITE” AND SEE WHAT’S GOING ON. I HAVE WASTED 4 DAYS INSTALLING AND UNINSTALLING THE PROGRAM, FOLLOWING THEIR PRECISE INSTRUCTIONS, TO NO AVAIL. THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE ‘TIL I VISITED THE FORUM ON THEIR SITE. WE CANNOT VISIT ANY SITES THAT USE THE FLASHPLAYER. THANK YOU

Press Release persons email addresses at Adobe

other way to get through to somebody at Adobe. http://www.adobe.com/bin/webfeedback.cgi

Message was edited by Jochem van Dieten to remove email addresses

M

Marc_Blitz

Inspiring

Next they need to hire some technical support who can speak English.

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Anonymous

Uh Marc,

Comments about people's ethnicity or language skills are totally out of line. Knock it off. Adobe's lameness aside, we're trying to figure out a technical problem here.

FWIW, per an earlier post, I uninstalled using the uninstaller and then deleted %APPDATA%\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player. Next I went to YouTube and downloaded the FlashPlayer again. It's working for now in Firefox. I'm on Windows 7. The other post mentioned a change in path for files that reside in this directory. It looks like some sort of a cache set up. Perhaps there's a bug in Flash that's exposed when site's old cache file appears to be ok but then other code looks for the new file name causing the hang. Just a theory.

Adobe, if that helps, please donate $1M to a charity to help folks to learn a second language to improve their world view.

-Mark

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jlac47

Participating Frequently

Sometime in the last month Adobe released a new version of Flash 10. I downloaded it last night and it seems to work fine. It will probably fix at least some other people's problems as well. However, after installing it I tried the old version of Flash 10 and it worked too, so it's possible that the problem just fixed itself on my computer at the same time I downloaded the new Flash.

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Marc_Blitz

Inspiring

Also new are an upgrade to firefox and Opera, and now everything broke

all over again. Sigh

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jlac47

Participating Frequently

Just to briefly sum up this mess of complaints, Flash player has consistently crashed web browsers on Win XP, Vista, Win 7, Win Server 2008, and Mac OS X, in some cases taking out the entire computer. This did not begin at the same time for everyone, as the earliest report was months ago and people are still reporting new problems. In some cases, there are a few web sites with flash content that can be viewed without a problem. Many solutions have been found, such as replacing hardware, cleaning up the registry, or turning off a firewall, but each one only seems to work for a few people. Several people have tried compleatly reistalling their OS, but I didn't see anyone reporting that it had worked.

Personally, I installed the Flash 10.1 developer release, and can usually avoid crashes if I'm nice, but again, it doesn't work for everyone. I have a Macbook and prior to this probem starting I partitioned off part of my hard drive and installed Win 7, and I only have problems on the Mac partition. I have not tried returning to the current version of Flash 10, but as it seems nothing has been done to resolve the problem I see no reason to.

A

Anonymous

It appears that there is not interest at Adobe about the thousands of hours people are wasting. Perhaps the only way to get attention is to slashdot them. It really seems that there is a myriad of problems with Flash -- so many that it may be wise for YouTube and others to find something that's reliable. If the TV blows up everytime you change the channel it's time to find something else to do.

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Marc_Blitz

Inspiring

Theyre on my shitelist, Ive since stopped deploying their wares in a

professional environment, and have told customers why we are changing

products.

They are not a must-have in any sense, and when they fix their problems,

if ever, I will be loathe to return to them seeing how we were treated

these months.

9

973559727

New Participant

It appears that I have 'fixed' my problem with the Flash player. I did 2 things at the same time, so I can't say for sure which corrected the problem, or maybe they were both involved.

First, I used the Adobe's uninstall_flash_player.exe program to do the uninstall. Then I started looking around my hard drive to see if there were any remnants of the program that weren't removed. I found bunches! Under C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data and C:\Documents and Settings\'My Name'\Application Data, there are Flash Player sub-directories under both Adobe and Macromedia. So, I renamed all of the Flash Player directories to Flash Player--. (Note: I had to reboot to do this, as these directories were still in use somewhere, even though I had already uninstalled Flash Player)

I then went to FoxNews, who I was having trouble with previously, and, of course, the Flash video wouldn't play, because it wasn't installed. However, there was a symbol in the Flash Player box saying 'Install Flash Player'. I clicked on that, it took me to the Adobe website, installed Flash Player, and all has been well since.

I went back and looked at the directory structure to see if the Flash Player directories had been rebuilt, and they had indeed. However, comparing the directories in the new installation to the old installation, there were some differences in the 'My Name'\Application Data\Marcomedia directory:

Old: Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\'RandomDirectoryName'\interactive.foxnews.com\FOX-News-Live-Stream.sol and s_br.sol

New: Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\'RandomDirectoryName'\interactive.foxnews.com\projects\video-player\video-player.swf\foxBusinessvideoplayer.sol

My problem started when FoxNews changed formats for their videos, and, obviously, their subdirectory structure, but Flash didn't realize it and was still trying to function under the old directory structure.

I believe that if the Flash uninstall had deleted all of the Flash Player directories, and allowed them to be rebuilt, I wouldn't have ever had a problem.

Obviously, it doesn't sound like this is an answer for everybody, but it may help some.

Best of luck, and HEY ADOBE, ARE YOU LISTENING???

BTW, the only other website that I was having trouble with works now, too.

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JimmiG_Swe

Participating Frequently

Well, considering I reformatted the entire hard drive and installed Win7 Pro x64 clean, I don't think that solution would work in my case.

There seems to be a number of separate issues with Flash and video playback, all resulting in the same symptoms (browser and/or whole computer crahses), but probably caused by different things.

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JimmiG_Swe

Participating Frequently

Might as well reply here. For the past 1-2 months, Flash video is crashing my entire computer, especially if I watch in full screen or have several tabs with flash video open. The whole computer freezes regardless of whether I use Chrome, Firefox or IE. It doesn't happen with all sites, or all the time, but often enough to be frustrating.

I even did a clean install of Windows 7, and replaced the RAM, but the problem remains. The only things that were installed were Windows itself, Flash and audio, video and networking drivers...

I don't think the video card, mobo or CPU are broken. Also the system is 100% stable running stress tests and games, and temperatures are fine.

I was going to try the registry fix, but I could not find the "D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000" entry under the compatibility node. It did appear in several other places however.

System is a Phenom II X4 955 3.2 GHz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, Radeon HD4850 video card, Windows 7 Pro x64. I tried both the latest official Flash version as well as the 10.1 beta. I'm not sure when this started, but until fairly recently my system was rock solid even playing flashing video.

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Peyman_std

New Participant

your problem is exactly the same as my problem. And the funny thing is that you r computer is also similar to my computer except I have phenom II 965 (Close hah ?)

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JimmiG_Swe

Participating Frequently

Well in a way that's good to hear, because it means there isn't really anything I can do other than wait for either Adobe or ATI to fix it. I had already tried pretty much everything anyway except replace the motherboard...and I don't thnk that it's causing the problem.

On the other hand, I would have prefered if it was something I could fix myself by editing the registry, re-installing something or whatever.

These problems are fairly new to me, my system used to be stable... so either:

-A new version of Catalyst broke flash (I update every time a new version comes out)

-The flash plugin got updated silently to a new version that breaks video playback on certain systems

-Many websites switched to a different version of their flash-based video players, which locks some systems up

-Windows 7 broke flash (I was using Vista until recently, and never had these problems)

I did isntall Vista on a separate partition over the last weekend. Going to do some testing to see whether flash videos crash under Vista too..That would at least possibly rule out the last possibility (or confirm that Win7 is the culprit).

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973559727

New Participant

Well, I've read through all of the posts and I have a situation that hasn't been discussed yet, so I'll add my info.

First, I have a 3.4GHz Sony VIAO desktop w/ 2GB ram, running XP Pro SP3 with all updates.

There are some websites that I can watch flash files all day, youtube included. A few freeze the browser (IE8), but all I have to do is close the affected tab and all is well. I have never had the browser totally freeze, or had the computer crash, as has been reported by others.

One of the sites that I have problems with is FoxNews. When I go to their home page (www.foxnews.com), there are ads running flash videos with no

problem. But when I click on a news video, the browser refreshes to video.foxnews.com/etc, the black area where the video should show appears, there is a faint image of the FoxNews logo in the black box for about 5 seconds, after which it fades out and nothing further happens.

On a machine that works properly, there is a flash ad to the right of the black box, but it is absent on my system. At the bottom of the screen in the info area, there is a warning symbol with the msg 'Error on page'. If I click on the error msg it states:

Message: Permission denied

Line: 2

Char: 44166

Code: 0

URI: http://video.foxnews.com/video-js.js?v9

Message: Object doesn't supprt this property or method

Line: 1

Char: 1

Code: 0

URI: http://(too damn long to type out here)

On another site (freedom.tv), the video doesn't load with the following error msg:

Message: '0.offsetWidth' is null or not an object

Line: 19

Char: 9

Code: 0

URI: http://freedom.tv/wp-content/themes/tcelements-light/scripts/coda.slider.js

Is it possible that the sites are not implimenting Flash properly???

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Marc_Blitz

Inspiring

Updating doesn't cure the problems. And interestingly, Opera works, FF

doesn't, and IE8 is broke too. Thats the status as of today.

A

Anonymous

DUDE! Its not just firefox its every browser.

Full Format x2 - nothing, same crashes

Reinstall windows vista 64 x2 - nothing, same crashes

Bought new hard drive, fresh install vista 64 - nothing, same crashes

Updated everything, bios, video,sound,browsers,everything and i mean everything. NADA!

And for those who have referred to microsoft thinking its a faulty something on the mobo here is something.

This has just recently started to happen to me, last few months, never had a problem running flash on youtube or

any other flash imbedded site, mind you I have also been using justin.tv alot recently <shrugs>

Whatever the cause i am quite certain it is not anything hardware related on my end as the amount of testimonials

from others related to the same problem seems to show.

So once again, this is flash related and flash only related, not if and or but of updating browsers as I have all of

them and updated.

Badabing Badabang!

Helioex

Participating Frequently

I can confirm the following on my end:

Installing the latest version of everything (drivers, browsers, Flash, etc) does not fix the problem
Installing only releases that were available 6 months ago also does nothing to fix the problem.
Installing beta versions of everything available does not fix the problem.

If the problem is hardware related, it would be causing a lot more than just flash to go boom. Gamers would be likely among the first people hit, and all seems quiet with them. Unless there is a piece of hardware in the machine that Flash, and only Flash, affects. To be honest I have no idea what Flash does at the hardware level, except access the sound and webcam data.

I have a hunch that it is going to be related somehow to the webcam access, like a buffer overrun or stack overflow. But that's just idle speculation born of frustration on my part.

A

Anonymous

It may well be time to start alerting your favorite blogger that Flash has a serious problem on nearly all platforms. Someone at Adobe should have a look at this as it's causing an unreasonable waste of time among lots of users.

I'm on Windows 7 and started seeing this suddenly. I was installing lots of new software at the time on a new system and so it was difficult to say what caused the problem to surface. I wasted about half a day dinkering with Flash installers that did not work, futzing with browser settings in both IE8 and Firefox.

A very key thing to note I think is that a YouTube video or other Flash content will begin to open and then seize up. The status bar will show the message "Transferring..." I watched with Wireshark and noted it appears that a TCP transaction is being attempted but the expected response may not be getting received. That led me to wonder about firewalls and ports being blocked. I have no proxy in play. Since I needed to replace Norton Internet Security with Norton 360 anyway, I gave it a try. After that Flash is working on IE 8 and FF. Days later however, back comes the problem.

This time it's after installing a USB driver to tether my PC to my mobile phone. One difference in the symptom is that sometimes, rebooting seems to solve the problem. At the moment, all is working for me. I'll probably continue to try to characterize the issue as is convenient.

My guess is that motivated Adobe engineer who understands RTMP could track down the cause of this issue and get a fix into the next version of Flash. Perhaps such person will speak up? I'd be happy to run network traces and help debug if the problem can't be reproduced in San Jose.

If I hear nothing and the problem comes back, I think my next post will be to Engadget.

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gridsleepAuthor

Participating Frequently

Flash is no longer crashing on my computer. I am at this moment running multiple videos in multiple tabs in multiple browsers, any of which one single instance would have crashed my browser or computer several days ago.

I replaced the motherboard.

The previous was an ASUS M2N-E with nVIDEA nForce 570 Ultra MCP northbridge and Award BIOS. During a two week period, programs failed, starting with Flash and degenerating to all programs, and then finally to not posting at all after swapping out the CPU. On removing the motherboard I discovered one of the power regulators had burned out, to the point where it had started to melt through the PCB before failing completely.

The new motherboard is a DFI LANParty DK 790FX-M2RS with AMD 790FX northbridge, SB600 southbridge, and Phoenix BIOS. The new board is much faster than the old in several ways, including memory bus and CPU type. I am using every bit of other hardware that was mounted on the old motherboard. Nothing else was replaced, except for the drive cables, as I used the new round cables that came with the new board.

It's been running for three days without a hitch. I can't speak for everyone, but I suspect power fluctuations were the main cause of the software failures before the board gave out completely. Flash Player may be very susceptible to timing problems that result from minor power fluctuations. Everyone having problems may want to check the steadiness of the power coming from the mains, and also check the power levels from the computer power supply. I suspect some may find the problem is not software but hardware related.

Others may be having a legitimate problem with Flash Player itself. I am leaving this topic unanswered for their sake. Such problems still need to be addressed by Adobe.

Helioex

Participating Frequently

That sounds like a problem with your power supply.

My client and I have the exact same motherboard. I'm checking now to see if anything is hot to the touch.

And, sure enough one of the chips on the mobo is hot enough to scald my fingertip. The client is purchasing a new power supply through Newegg. Once it arrives I'll update y'all if it works or not.

Nothing else has helped the problem.

J

jlac47

Participating Frequently

I was able to get a partial fix by installing the Flash Player 10.1 open beta here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html. It still has some bugs in it so I usually open a different browser for doing anything with flash, but at least it works some of the time.

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Marc_Blitz

Inspiring

lIKE TAKES US TO THE OLD, NON-BETA 10.0.32.18

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jlac47

Participating Frequently

I'm assuming you meant to say "LINK TAKES US TO THE OLD, NON-BETA 10.0.32.18", not "lIKE TAKES US TO THE OLD, NON-BETA 10.0.32.18"

Every time I click the link, it takes me to 10.1. If something weird is going on and some people are sent to the current version of Flash, you can get to 10.1 by going to adobe.com, clicking the Comunities link at the top of the page, clicking the developers link on the page that takes you to, and you should see a link to the Flash Player 10.1 page somewhere on that page, probably on the left side.

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