Flash player keeps crashing

Question

Since a couple of months I've been having serious problems with flash player. Must be version 11. something.
I know there's been posts about this, but would like to try get a fix for my specific situation before I start trying 101 different ones aimed for other users.
Basically there's 2 games I play online, Forge of Empires and Goalunited, both flash games. I'm happily playing around when after 15 mins or sometimes sooner flashplayer crashes. (get the blank page with the grey exclamation mark in the centre). Usually I just refresh and it works again for another 10 minutes. Other times it says it can't detect flash player on my system, which means I have to reinstall it, which is a major pain, because I have to close all windows, MSN etc or it won't install.
I'm using Windows 7, Internet explorer 9. Tried using Chrome and Firefox, but it does the same there, so it's not about the browser. Uninstalled and reinstalled it, no fix. It also happens on Youtube and imagine on any flash based game/site I'd use.
Frankly, I'm sick of it so I'm asking you for help. I've been using flash player for many many years without a problem, ever, but lately is it doing my head in with all the random crashes.
Let me know what information you need and I will provide it so we can look at what the problem is.
Thanks

Answer 1

Getting the Out of Memory icon is the result of one of two things: 1.) you're running out of system memory (RAM), or 2.) you're running out of GPU texture memory.
I would first run the game in a single window with nothing else running on the system and see if that improves the situation for you.  Each browser window or tab that's open consumes resources.  Most browsers have also added hardware graphics acceleration to speed up HTML rendering over the last year.  This means that there's new contention for the GPU resources on your system.
To get around the GPU memory limitation (if that's what you're hitting), you might try disabling hardware acceleration.  (Right click on some Flash content, choose Settings, click the left-most tab and uncheck Use Hardware Acceleration)  This will impact performance on on graphics and video tasks that currently leverage hardware acceleration, but may get you around the memory limitation you're bumping into.  It's the easiest way to figure out whether or not that's what you're running into.
There are some third-party anti-malware/anti-virus/firewall applications that multiple people have referenced on the forums as causing general memory leaks on their system.  You might consider temporarily disabling or uninstalling those kinds of applications as well, as you may see improvement there.
It's also very possible that this is just an issue with the game(s).  If you create a whole bunch of objects during gameplay and you don't release them, we won't garbage collect them because we think they're actively being used.  Over time, the memory usage is just going to grow until it hits the upper limit.