Question

I have a computer on my network where the Flash Player 10 ActiveX control installation is messed up in IE7, and isn’t recognized as Flash Player 10 by javascript, so that any website you go to that tries to identify your flash player warns you that you need to update, and sometimes just displays alternative content (SWFObject, for instance won’t load the flash, because it doesn’t detect a recent enough version of Flash Player).

So, I tried to uninstall it. I uninstalled everything related to flash in the windows control panel and even restarted the computer. There is now no sign of Flash Anything in the control panel but when I go to some websites, the flash will still play in IE, and warn that the flash player needs to be updated (if I right click on the Flash object, it says ‘About Adobe Flash Player 10’).

So the question is: How do I manually uninstall Flash player? Or: do you have any idea what might be causing it to be buggy and stupid?

Thanks! 🙂

Answer 1

On 32-bit windows:

cd /d %windir%\system32\macromed\flash 

On 64-bit windows:

cd /d %windir%\syswow64\macromed\flash 

This is where the flash binaries live. You can delete them manually, or run the uninstall utility in this directory. You will need to shutdown all running browser instances to do so.

cd '..\..\Downloaded Program Files' 

This is where ActiveX installation data is kept. You should see a file called ‘swflash.ini’, though it may be in a subdirectory or multiple subdirectories if you’ve been re-installing a lot (IE creates a subdir whenever there is a name collision). Delete all instances of this file as well.

There will still be entries in the Registry for Flash, but if you plan on re-installing anyway they should be fine. Otherwise you can load regedit and search for ‘flash’ and manually delete and keys that look good. You should export your registry first in case you accidentally delete something you shouldn’t have.