What should have been a 5-minute Flash player upgrade, turned into a 3-hour search-and-destroy mission…

All I wanted to do this morning was upload a video to my facebook page (admission: yes, I’m on facebook). Naturally, after uploading it I wanted to simply watch it real quick and move on with my life. Or so I thought.

My click on the video was greeted with the dreaded *Flash Player Upgrade required* message. Dreaded because my workspace on any given day consists of at least 4 open Firefox windows (among a ton of other open applications), with at least 10 open tabs in each window. And as we all know, to complete the Flash installation, you have to close Firefox. And even by killing Firefox with the use of the task manager so one can use *Restore Previous Session* upon restarting Firefox, it’s more than just inconvenient.

Needles to say I had to give it a try by clicking the Flash installation file without first closing Firefox. Needles to say it didn’t work and the installation refused to continue.

So for some unknown reason I decided that installing this update was of utmost importance at this point in my life, plus I might have felt a little adventurous, so I killed the Firefox task and clicked on the downloaded installation file again.

Everything should have gone smoothly from here on – remove old Flash installation (no need to download the Adobe Flash uninstall tool anymore), install new version. That’s what I thought. The installation came to a screeching halt and presented me with an error message notifying me of the following problem:

Error opening file for writing:
C:\\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\NPSWF32.dll

Three options were also included: Abort | Retry | Ignore

After trying Retry a couple of times, I chose Ignore and again thought I would be able to move on with my life after a browser restart. Wrong! The installation was incomplete, I was still unable to play the video.

Back to closing Firefox, running the installation again, with the same result.
Check file and folder permissions. Check.
OK, download Adobe Flash uninstall tool and run it. Check.
Inspect installed programs for traces of Flash. Check.
So everything is fine, right?
Run installation again. Oops. Same error.

But Google is my friend, there’s no need to panic, right? Shouldn’t take more than a minute. Wrong again…
Fast forward… (3 hours and another pot of coffee later)…

This is what worked for my configuration (Vista 64-Bit, Firefox 3.0.10 & Flock 2.0.3):
In Firefox (and Flock), go to Tools -> Addons and select the Plugins tab.
See if you have Adobe Acrobat listed as a plugin, if yes, select it and disable it.
Go through the routine again (kill Firefox, start installation). It should now work without a problem.

So if you have the same problem, I hope it will work for you as well. Assuming this article will be one of the 600 (today) search results on Google dealing with this problem.

Tags: adobe error firefox flash installation npswf32.dll setup vista

Date posted: Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 12:39 pm (15 years, 4 months ago.)
Posted in: tech mix
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