Whilst I was working at a school, I came across a problem that I hadn't seen before.  The school have an espresso box which they use extensively throughout the school curriculum, this generally works very well on all of the school computers except one.  This particular machine when displaying the espresso home page in Internet Explorer kept throwing a wobbly and reloading the page.

As espresso is mainly flash based, I sort of knew where to start looking.  So I headed over to www.adobe.com and used the Get Flash Player button.  This presented me with the usual IE6 XPSP2 message about installing an ActiveX control, I let it install as you do.  The flash object on the page just froze and flash wouldn't install the latest version no matter how long I left it.

After scratching my head a little, altering the settings in Internet Explorer with no success, I decided that I needed to completely remove flash from the machine and hope that the installer page would be able to successfully install the flash ActiveX component again.

So how do you uninstall Flash player?  Well you could go through the file system deleting random files and attacking the Windows registry with a sledge hammer, or you can download the Uninstall Flash application from the Adobe website.

I choose the easiest option and downloaded the uninstallation utility.  The utility was written in September 2006, round about the time when Macromedia was taken into the Adobe fold.  It was written specifically to remove version 7 of the flash ActiveX, but it works just great for later versions.

Once the utility was downloaded, I ran the program.  The program asked want language I wanted to use then if I was sure that I wanted to remove Flash - obviously I did.  The program quickly launched a KillBrowser.exe application from the temp folder, this closed all Internet Explorer windows that I had open.  It done some other stuff and then proclaimed that it had finished.

So had flash been removed?  I visited the espresso website and sure enough it had gone.  In fact Internet Explorer wanted to to reinstall flash at that point.  I decided not to install flash from this page, instead opting to re-visit the Adobe site to be sure that I had the latest version.

Flash installed perfectly with the version number 9.0.28 being displayed on the verification page.  A quick visit to the espresso page also confirmed that the flash was indeed working correctly.  The espresso home page was no longer causing Internet Explorer to refresh the page.  So job done - Next problem.

Whilst on the subject of Flash, I have had issues upgrading the Flash Player ActiveX from version 8 to version 9.  I go through the routine of visiting the Get Flash page and allowing the ActiveX installation to run, but the version remains at 8, no matter if I reboot the computer or not.

Uninstalling Flash and re-visiting the Get Flash page to install the latest version does in fact install version 9 of the flash player.

Be careful when you are installing the Flash Player - If you are unlucky you might be offered to get the Yahoo toolbar installed free of charge.  Damed Search Engine toolbars are becoming a menace, I wish companies didn't bundle them with the software!  The average school administrator will just click install button, then moan because computer has slowed down and that pop-up windows on websites that previously worked don't anymore.

Anyway, where can you get the Flash Uninstall Utility?

Check out the Adobe Knowledge Base article at http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_14157 for more information.