Corrupt Flash Player install after IE 7 upgrade

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I’ve been seeing a few mails about this since the Internet Explorer update was released, so I wanted to post some info about it to maybe help the people having issues.

The complaint generally goes something like this:

A user has Flash Player 9 (or other version) installed on their system and everything works fine with IE6. That user then runs the IE7 update and their computer stops showing Flash content on sites like YouTube or MSN video and other Flash sites. However, if the user goes to some other sites with Flash content, the content will play just fine, even if the site requires the Flash 9 Player.

I’m not sure of the official cause for this, and am still doing some research into what causes it, but a first guess I have is that when you upgrade from IE7, the browser install is not correctly reinstalling your existing Flash Plugin, so scripts that check for the Flash Player are failing, but since the plugin file is there, if you visit a site that does not use a detection script (like SWFObject) you will see the Flash content just fine.

There may not be a solution to this for the sites using detection scripts – they rely on a series of Windows registry entries that seem to be missing after an IE7 upgrade.

For users, here is a fix that seems to work well:

  1. Quit all open programs. This step is important because other programs may be using the Flash Player, and if they are, the uninstaller will fail silently.
  2. Run the Adobe Flash Player Uninstaller.
  3. Reinstall your Flash player.

If you are still having problems after running the uninstaller and reinstalling the plugin, please post a comment with your system setup and other relevant details. (And remember, sometimes a system restart can make a difference with problems like this, so try that first).

UPDATE (1-8-2007): Added a new step 1.

221 thoughts on “Corrupt Flash Player install after IE 7 upgrade”

  5. It worked fine for me. For those who cannot make it work, i recommend you to reboot after uninstallation, and the continue to install.
    Thank you

  7. I agree
    “It worked fine for me. For those who cannot make it work, i recommend you to reboot after uninstallation, and the continue to install”

  10. Downloaded the flash for IE7 and worked without reboot using Vista. Thanks so much to all of you. I was completely in the dark as to why my site worked beautifully on FF but not on IE7. You’ve all been a huge help!

    MassCraft

  34. thank you Great post!…I try to do this myself weekly, and it does pay off. It gets your name and site out there for more people to see it

  40. Well, about the IE7 problem. If you use the Dreamweaver JS funcion “AC_RunActiveContent.js” the flash in IE7 works fine, but using the SWFObject it doesn’t. I don’t know what was changed in the update, but there are some in the DW function that make the flash working…

  44. I have Vista 32bit. Yesterday flash told me it needed to update my flash player so I clicked yes and didn’t see any errors, then SWFObject stopped working for me in IE7, though youtube flash still worked. SWFObject still worked in FireFox.

    Downloading this standalone IE 7 Flash installer and running it fixed it for me (thanks for the link in this thread):
    http://weblogs.asp.net/derekh/archive/2005/08/16/422743.aspx
    I didn’t have to run it as administrator.

    I hope Adobe fixes their flash installer, as I use SWFObject extensively and much prefer it. But if only SWFObject is affected by this bug, then who knows when it will get fixed… I thought this bug maybe broke flash version sniffing via javascript, but doesn’t youtube do that – so why was that unaffected?

  46. I been working on this site and have a problem with Flash and IE7. I just uninstalled, rebooted, and then reinstalled the Flash player and my Flash still does not show in IE7. The page test ok under Safari and FF on the Mac and FF on the PC. I’m using Spry on the page if that makes a difference. Any help would be appreciated.

  48. Those who choose to take the “slights and disappointments” path, meanwhile, are very generously compensated for their trouble

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