Windows Vista: A plugin (Shockwave Flash) isn't responding.

[Guest]

OMG!!! I hope I don't have to wait as long as Rual has. Five Months?? Are you serious dude? Holy Moly. You can count me in too: Vista OS, FIrefox browser, I don't seem to have this issue so much with Youtube as I do with any webpage I try to open. And I mean ANY. A video chatroom, Skype, or just looking at vids with links on webpage. I tried to get screen-grab but can't. Pop-up window says "plugin is unresponsive. Do I want to (click on continue) or do I want to (stop plugin)? I click on stop and it frees up.

So it seems to me the consensus from this thread here is Flash has a bug that doesn't like stuff, or is conflicting with other software. I would like to know what this is too. It only seemed to be a problem within the past week.Certainly the people here expressing their frustration on this problem is just a fraction of the millions who are having this problem.  I ask that Adobe please find a solution to this ASAP. Certainly Adobe would love to see kudos in this space instead of users pulling their hair out screaming for relief. And I don't spell relief R O L A I D S either.

[pwillener]

blueriverdream wrote:

OMG!!! I hope I don't have to wait as long as Rual has. Five Months??

RaulP5 received a reply within a few days, and has never reported back, so we can assume that his problem was fixed with Jeromie's advice.

[jeromiec83223024]

Adobe doesn't provide free support for products it offers free of charge.  We do provide these user-to-user forums, but the staff and volunteers who do provide answers do so as a courtesy, and typically in their free time, evenings, etc.  There's no dedicated support staff here.  You *can* pay for support on a per-incident basis if you want a guaranteed response. 

While we do try to help out, if it's busy from an operational perspective, or the question comes in during a week where we're not in the office, the reality is that you're probably not going to get a personalized response from the staff that do monitor things.  It's a community forum, and volunteers like Pat do a tremendous service by trying to pick up the slack, but the reality is that there are only a few experts to go around.

That being said, there isn't one Flash Player, and the Flash Player for IE on Windows 8 and higher is not the Flash Player for IE on Vista.  I've separated this post out so that the other conversation (which started out as about Win8 and Win10) doesn't get convoluted. 

There's only about 1% of the browsing population on Vista at this point, and it's not an area of focus.  We're not going to fix Vista-only bugs at this point.  Windows 7 x64 is by far the most populous and mature version available at this point, and Windows 10 is free, but there will be a long-tail of driver related issues, particularly for users on older hardware.

It's hard to know what's going on with your Vista installation, but the slow script dialog is thrown because you're viewing content and Flash Player is consuming a lot of CPU resources. 

If you're seeing this on video or 3D content, it's probably because we're not able to offload the processing for 3D rendering or hardware decoding to your GPU, which is purpose-built to do that efficiently.  There are also a lot of poorly-written ads, ad insertion code, and techniques like "ad stuffing", which content providers are employing to try and pay the bills.  Unfortunately, these techniques really degrade the browsing experience and are why ad-blocking is such a big topic of conversation lately.

The other possibilities are just that the system isn't running well, and it's time for a reboot and the regular system maintenance (scandisk, defrag, etc), you're using a third-party virus scanner/anti-malware package that's not performing well (many of the free ones are frequent sources of pain), or you've got a malware infection that's not being detected (Vista lacks most of the important modern OS protections against malware, and any decent malware isn't going to trip your virus scanner).

There's no silver bullet, or a single root-cause for the slow script dialog.  Vista wasn't designed for an era when people ran 30 simultaneous tabs indefinitely, in a complex security landscape.

Problems like registry fragmentation -- which are largely solved in Win8+, but plagued long-running windows installations could also be in play.  You might just spin up a new user on the machine and see if your browsing experience improves dramatically.  If it does, you might think about doing a new windows installation, running a reputable registry cleaner (after a good, verified backup), or migrating your stuff to the clean profile.