IE8 & ADOBE FLASH PLAYER FIX

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

Since Javascript was enabled, in order to check whether this was a problem of Youtube’s site only, I browse to other sites that I know use flash tech to find that I was really unable to watch any Flash content. They all prompted me to download and install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.

So I visited Adobe’s site and tried to get the latest Flash Player online. The key thing is that after installing the add-on, the movie clip that always appear on the site saying that your installation was successful didn’t appear at all. Strangely, by refreshing the page -by hitting the F5 key- it did appear. Weird.

So I said, maybe this was just a minor glitch, and opened the video page on Youtube. Unluckily, that nasty message appeared again.

This time, I opened the “Tools” menu of IE8, and selected the “Manage Add-Ons” section. There, I found that the “Shockwave Flash Object” add-on was in fact installed and the version was correct, so I tried to “reset” it by disabling the component, closing the browser, re-open it and finally enable the add-on. No luck!

One final desperate move: just in case, I just opened the following menu on my browser:

“Tools -> Internet Options -> General -> Delete”

and deleted everything. Then, I downloaded the offline installer of Adobe Flash Player from the following link:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/ts/documents/tn_19166/Install_Flash_Player_10_ActiveX.zip

And finally, I closed the browser and executed the installer (btw, since the offline installer does the task of uninstalling any previous version of the add-on, I skipped that part and let it do it for me).

When the process ended, I just reopened IE8, visited Youtube again to find this time that everything simply worked just fine!

I don’t know if this workaround will work for you, but if you happen to experience a similar situation then just give it a try.

Well, that’s it for today. I hope you find this post useful.

http://amapplease.blogspot.com/2009/03/ie8-adobe-flash-player-fix.html

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=751016

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