Unable to get Flash Player 32.0.0.101 via Windows Update

It's all good.  I came up through support in my early career, which is why I keep finding myself on the forums.  I spent a lot of time walking people through extracting winsock.dll from CABs on their original Windows install floppies.  Good times. 

There's such a wide variety of experience here that I'm always trying to walk that line of steering people towards solutions without getting them in too deep if something goes wrong.  I usually approach that by going step-by-step when things are predictable, and then tapering off the instructions as the risk increases.

It's great that the approach you took works, and it's an interesting option in a pinch.  I don't think that I'd be comfortable recommending manually removing them through safe mode.

What I worry about when having people manually work in directories managed by auto-updaters is that *future* updates may not be reliable.  I've heard that concern expressed by engineers on teams that own those updaters (not the WU team specifically), and because we do a lot of manual messing around with files that would otherwise be automatically managed by the updater for our own testing, I've definitely seen sporadic flakiness on random test machines as a result.

I always worry about people making changes that might have repercussions long after they've moved on and forgotten about doing it.  It's probably fine (famous last words), but keep an eye on it for a couple updates to make sure that you're staying patched.

In terms of the editor.  The Forum software is built by Jive Software.  It's not the best rich-text editor I've used in the browser, but certainly not the worst.  Personally, I *hate* that operating systems paste rich/HTML text formatting by default.  I wish that I could just disable it as a system-wide preference.  It's the worst.  I use "Paste and Match Formatting" on Mac wherever possible these days.  I think it's like "Paste Special > Plaintext" (at least in Excel) on Windows.

The editor is building HTML under the hood, so you can actually click the HTML link in the editing toolbar and close the offending formatting tag, but that's a pretty horrible user experience.  I assume that it's technically doing the right thing by leaving the formatting tags open, because the formatting that you pasted never changed back the normal text.  I think the assumption that it's making is correct, but it's not ideal by any means.  You can usually start a new paragraph or bulleted list (which will coax the editor into closing that tag) and then gingerly backspace into it.

There's also an Advanced Editor link (at least for me) in the upper right of the reply window.  That gives you some more formatting options like font and style.  It actually works better than the default editor in a lot of ways.  I'm not sure why it isn't the default choice.  It must be more lightweight or more broadly compatible...

Exactly.  If you've applied the latest Windows Update that corresponds to Flash Player 32.0.0.101 (see my note above about the correct KB number for that patch), then those files should have been updated.

The subtle distinction that I was making in the title was a reflection of the fact that those changes MUST come from Windows Update.  There's no way for you, even with Administrator access, to change those files directly.  In the same vein, we can't provide a tool that magically solves this, because our installers would have the same restrictions on filesystem access.

For me, it was a thread that I wanted to keep an eye on, but I wanted a reminder that it wasn't a problem with our installers, since they're not applicable on the platform that you're using.  We don't really have any control in this particular situation, but I'm curious about what the ultimate resolution is.  I also didn't want to invite a wave of "me too" replies for people on platforms where Windows Update wasn't in play, as that would simply muddy the conversation.

If you're applying the relevant Windows Update and it's not actually updating the files, you'll probably need to open a support case with Microsoft to figure out why Windows Update isn't making those changes.  My hope was that you just needed to grab an additional patch, since that would be a straightforward thing to do.  If that's not helping, then because those changes are happening in a protected part of the filesystem that's owned by Windows Update, there's literally nothing that we can offer you in terms of a way to overwrite them.

A couple of general things that you could try would be removing and reinstalling the last Windows Update for Flash from Add/Remove Programs to see if you can coax Windows Update into removing and replacing those files.  Windows 10 also has a System File Checker utility and a non-destructive option for "refreshing" the operating system files while retaining all of your user data.  If those things are within your comfort level, great.  Do backups first, just in case.  If not, I'd steer you towards expertise from Microsoft support instead.  Short of that, I don't have any great suggestions.

I think you actually needed the following update from Microsoft: KB4471331

This is the embedded Flash Player ActiveX Control released by Microsoft for Windows 8 and above, not Adobe.

According to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4471331/security-update-for-adobe-flash-player Microsoft has made the update available. To install the update, run Windows Update, as per Microsoft's support document.