I stumbled across a strange problem today. I was called to a home where I was told that Adobe Flash Player was giving errors. Easy fix, I thought.

The problem presented when the user was forwarded a link to a YouTube video and gave the error message: “Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player”. The diligent user promptly checked Internet Explorer’s settings and confirmed JavaScript was enabled (which I also independently confirmed). This of course left Flash as the culprit. I attempted to reinstall Flash from the Adobe Flash Player site which is supposed to confirm the install by playing a video, and although a box came up claiming it installed successfully, there was no video to confirm the claim.

After a bit more research, I came across the following Adobe Knowledge Base article “How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control”, which supplies an actual flash removal tool. Evidently the ActiveX installer in IE checks for the existence of the Flash ocx or possibly if it is registered, but if the file is corrupted, it will still report a successful install. Removing and reinstalling flash solved the issue. It may also be important to note that there were additional removal tools for OS X.