In recent days, we’ve had several emails sent to our customer service department about Adobe Flash upgrade failures. Our sense of what has happened is that the latest Windows update, which has occurred for most users sometime within the last week and a half, is making Flash not work on some Windows machines.
Here is what is happening:
Windows is upgraded to the latest service pack- When viewing a show on our site, a warning tells the user that they need the latest version of Flash. This is almost assuredly not true — the correct version of Flash is installed in the majority of cases, but the browser is not recognizing that it is installed.
- When the user goes to Adobe’s site to try and install the latest version of Flash, the site tells them that it is installed. (Likely installing the exact same version they already had installed.)
- When the user comes back to our site, the warning still tells them that they need the latest version of Flash.
The problem appears to be mainly confined to Vista users so far, although one XP user has experienced the same problem.
This is not a problem with RealEstateShows.com, but with the installation of Flash. Everyone who has experienced this problem has been to go to the following page: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/ to see if it showed that Flash was installed. For all of them, it indicated that Flash was NOT installed, despite the fact that just minutes before, they had installed the Flash player.
At this point, we are not sure if there is a workaround. It is impacting very few users, so we are instructing those who are experiencing this problem to contact Adobe through the Adobe Support page and register the problem. The more people who contact Adobe and tell them that something is up, the more likely they are to come up with a solution sooner rather than later.
7/14/2008 Update
Thanks to Keith Lutz at LovingCharlotte.com, we were pointed in the right direction for a fix that seems to work predictably.
- Go to this page, and download the appropriate uninstaller file: Download Uninstaller Note: you should close all browser windows before running the uninstaller file.
- Go back to adobe.com, and reinstall the Flash Player: Download Installer
This should resolve the problem.
Thanks for putting this out there. This has been driving me batty. I started using another Browser and it worked fine on there. So it must be IE’s problem. I have XP Professional and Vista, and it is a problem on both. It not only affects Realestateshows, but alot of other things too (like my Yahoo videos). Thanks for writing this article and letting me know for sure, I was not alone!
Keith, you’re welcome. So we can all understand this better, which browser did you switch to to make it work for you?
Firefox.
Also just found this after googling “Flash ie7 problem”
http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2007/02/19/problem-with-flash-in-ie7.aspx
It worked, and fixed my problem with ie7!