Outlook email not working when there is an adobe flash player update

[steffanblaser]

why do i have to restart my computer every time there is an abobe flash player update because my outlook email program will not send or receive emails? This happens regularly and I have to restart or outlook email Will Not Work--it makes it hard to work that way. Can you help fix that problem please because it happens all the time. my email is [moderator: personal information removed as per community forum privacy policy] a friend of mine works with Albiero Energy and their tech guys stopped using abobe because they had the same issues as myself are you aware of this problem with outlook? I am not getting any message but outlook will not send or receive emails--then when I am forced to restart because of my emails not working sure enuf it is a pop up window saying there is an adobe flash player update. I do the update and then my email starts working again--what the heck is up with that--this happens at least once a week. I just had to restart just now and got my emails for Saturday and today. Very Frustrating.

[Test Screen Name]

Next time in happens try, after the reboot, ignoring the Flash update. It might be unconnected. There are also NOT that many Flash Player updates. 

[steffanblaser]

Thanx I will try that. It happened again today. email stopped working and upon restart it was a flash player update--I didn;t see this until now--next time I will take your advice and try ignoring it. Thanx 🙂

[RuskinF]

I believe that any browser update needs the browser to reboot in order to help it work for providing a better experience to the user.

I have had the problem as well.

And it not only happens with the flash player but every other app that I use.

[steffanblaser]

Sorry it happens to you as well. A better user experience would be if it didn't stop my email outlook program to not work--Thanx for your input 🙂

[_maria_]

Microsoft Windows 8.1 and 10 is the only operating system I'm aware of that requires a reboot after applying the Flash Player update to IE and Edge browsers.

Microsoft embeds Flash Player in IE and Edge browsers and considers it a required system component.  Adobe is not privy to how Microsoft embeds Flash Player, nor why they require a system reboot after the update is applied.  This is a question for Microsoft, not Adobe.

[steffanblaser]

Thanx You Maria for your input.
Steffan

[removed your personal contact details]

[jeromiec83223024]

For what it's worth, Adobe uses Outlook.  We have something in the neighborhood of 10K employees.  Flash and Outlook don't really overlap.  If this were consistently happening to all Flash + Outlook users, I'd be getting non-stop flack about it from colleagues.

This seems coincidental, or self-inflicted (a too-tight windows security policy intersecting with something getting installed through the usual Windows installation mechanisms causes weird side-effects that are resolved by a reboot).

We also provide mechanisms for IT administrators to control the installation and roll-out of Flash Player.  It sounds like those aren't being managed in your environment.  It's totally possible for your system administrators to deploy Flash updates silently to managed machines, and to test those updates before rolling them out to your user population.  If you need Flash and are experiencing installation problems, your friendly IT person can do a lot of useful troubleshooting based on the Windows logs already on your machine.

I'm pretty curious about the details, because this is super weird, and I like weird.  The long and short of it is that Flash serves updates to billions of users on a monthly basis.  A 0.01% failure rate would crush us under support complaints.  Given the overlap in the Venn diagram of "people with Flash on their machines" and "people with Outlook at work", I'd have a concerned executive currently standing over my shoulder if this were a widespread issue.

Where the installer fails, there's a confounding factor involved.  Super weird behavior, like "your installer causes this completely unrelated application to stop working until I reboot" implies something really low-level going wrong, like the underlying storage is messed up (e.g. disk is corrupted or failing, running the installer perturbs it, outlook fails to read and locks up), or like oddball administrator-defined enterprise security settings get triggered by something the installer does without problem on normal machines, puts the system in a bad state until reboot, or maybe administrator-configured security software intervenes aggressively and puts the system in a similarly bad state.

Given that our installer succeds, I can't imagine that we're going to get anything interesting in our logs.  You should talk to your IT folks, and encourage them to look at the Event Logs on your machine for periods where Outlook failed.  If you're lucky, Windows is logging errors about whatever the underlying issues is, and will hopefully provide clues.  I'm super curious about what that underlying failure is, but I'm pretty confident that it's well outside our sphere of influence.  We're just tickling something underneath us that's in a bad state.

[steffanblaser]

Thanx I am my own admin which is kind of child like when it comes to that. Thanx for your input. I will see what my local tech has to say. 🙂