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Petja's technical blog

For you Vista users out there, if you’re seeing strange issues with Adobe Flash, where the plugin is installed but not recognized on certain sites, I have a solution for you. The “installation successful” page tells me that I have Flash installed. I can see the Flash banners just fine. Yet when try to watch a video on a page that uses Flash, it tells me that I need to have the latest Flash player installed. I’ve confirmed that “Shockwave Flash Object” is installed (Tools > Manage Add-Ons), and Flash10a.ocx is the file name. If you’re having the same problem, keep reading.

Even though Adobe’s online tool said I was running the latest version of Flash (10.0.12.36), it still wasn’t working properly. I ran across a forum post that suggested trying several things, so I found the install folder for Flash:

C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash

Inside that folder, there are two files: Flash10a.ocx, the ActiveX control that IE7 uses, and FlashUtil10a.exe. I shut down IE7 then ran FlashUtil10a.exe and it said that there was an update for my version of Flash – downloaded the new version, rebooted the PC as suggested, and now I can view all Flash content as I should. What’s interesting is that the version number of Flash didn’t change. I suspect the issue is more one of registering Flash with the system properly, and Adobe has a bug in the installer. This worked for me, so I hope it will work for you!

Windows Vista comes equiped with two-way firewall, but by default only inbound protection is enabled not to bother inexperienced users with confusing firewall warnings.
Here I will show you how to enable outbound protection to further increase Windows Vista security.
Navigate to start button in left bottom corner and type in“windows firewall with advanced security”. In “Windows Firewall properties” set outbound connection to “block”, according to your firewall policy (home or public). Now when outbound protection is enabled, go to “outbound rules” and add which program you want to be able to access the internet.

By default not even Internet Explorer is able to access Internet with outbound rules set to block.