Flash Player 16.0.0.235 breaks audio driver on Windows

Question

There is a severe bug in the latest version of Flash Player, relating to audio playback on Windows. Ever since upgrading to v16.0.0.235, Flash has been repeatedly breaking audio playback for the entire Windows system (i.e. every application that tries to play back audio, not just Flash itself). This happens regardless of the browser in which Flash is run (tested: Firefox 34.0.5 and Chrome 39.0.2171.95).
There seem to be two "levels" of crashing the audio driver. Both are triggered by simply using Flash content with audio for a while (examples in my case would be MP3 previews on Amazon.com, or YouTube videos).
In a "level 1" crash, Flash elements on pages will just suddenly stop playing back any audio. Some content, such as Amazon MP3 previews, will just skip over all the tracks as each player fails to start audio playback. YouTube videos will play for 1 second without sound, retry using a lower-quality stream, repeat until there are no more streams left and then report that there has been a playback error. No other Windows application is able to play back sound anymore either. They will either fail with some error message related to audio playback, or simply run without sound. (Examples: foobar2000, Spotify, VLC media player...).
A level 1 crash is relatively easy to fix by killing the Flash Player process. If for example the crash happened while using Firefox, I have to kill "plugin-container.exe" or the FlashPlayer executable using the task manager. Once Flash has been killed, it will restart as soon as another Flash content is being played back, and sound will be working again, in Flash and all other Windows applications. I once tried to shut down Windows while in this level 1 crash state, and the shutdown got hung up on trying to quit Windows Explorer, which reported the status message "Playing back logoff sound", which it failed to do for 5+ minutes and just kept trying endlessly. I had to cancel system shutdown, kill the FlashPlayer process first, and then I could shut down Windows.
Sometimes after a few level 1 crashes and restores, there will be a level 2 crash. Now, audio playback will not just fail for applications, but every application that tries to play back audio will freeze completely. Firefox will freeze. It thaws once I kill FlashPlayer, but will freeze again immediately if some other page content loads FlashPlayer again. A tab in Chrome that uses Flash with audio will immediately freeze. Spotify will no longer report an audio playback issue as in level 1, but will freeze when trying to play back a track. Same for any other application I tried. Unfortunately, I haven't found a fix for a level 2 crash short of rebooting the entire system. Killing all Flash-related processes wasn't enough. Not even rebooting the audio driver (by disabling and re-enabling the audio device in Windows' device manager) did the trick.
My system specs:
Windows 7 Professional x64
Adobe Flash Player 16.0.0.235
ASUS Xonar D2X audio interface (driver: v7.12.8.1794)
On-board Realtek High-Definition Audio interface (driver: v6.0.1.6449)
The Realtek audio is normally not in use, but Flash will crash either audio driver, whichever is active at the moment).
After downgrading to Flash Player 15 I haven't experienced any crashes anymore.
Any help or insight is appreciated!
Edit: the issue seems to be Flash crashing the Windows audio service. I tried stopping and restarting the audiosrv and AudioEndpointBuilder services while in level 2 crash state, both of which failed because neither service reacts to stop/start commands anymore.

Answer 1

I have this EXACT problem as well. I'd like to add that when either 'level' of crash occurs, when I attempt to play a video or audio file through Windows Media Player, I receive the error message: "Your computer is running low on memory. Quit other programs, and then try again" I checked on the task manager and I have plenty of RAM remaining and this error message only occurs when I am experiencing this issue so I am sure that it is caused by this.
Flash Version: 16_0_0_235
Operating System
    Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit SP1
CPU
    Intel Core i7 4770K @ 3.50GHz    44 °C
    Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM
    8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
    Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. H97-D3H-CF (SOCKET 0)    28 °C
Graphics
    BenQ E900HD (1366x768@60Hz)
    S24D300 (1920x1080@60Hz)
    Intel HD Graphics 4600 (Gigabyte)
    3071MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 (Gigabyte)    34 °C
Storage
    931GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A SCSI Disk Device (SATA)    38 °C
Optical Drives
    HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22NS70 SCSI CdRom Device
Audio
    NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM)