Flash remains completely buggy, despite trying all advice

Question

Hi everyone,
So I've had problems with Flash on my MBP for some time now and I've been unable to resolve them.
I've searched this forum, read the available info at Adobe, and have tried a number of things suggested in other posts and on the Adobe site, but no luck.
Firstly, the problem:
Certain flash content I access with my system seems to work OK. Except for the usual CPU-hogging and fans going to high speed, some Flash content works as expected.
But more often than not, Flash content just doesn't work properly. For example, several youtube videos (not all, but most) don't work properly - the transport controls often don't display properly and just don't work. Trying to hit pause doesn't pause - it just starts the video from the beginning again right away, it's impossible to actually stop playback without just closing the window entirely. Not all youtube videos have this problem but most do. TED talks are an example of a youtube site where it always does this.
Other flash-based players like in MySpace also don't work properly. Pretty much 100% of the time I don't see any text in the music players (so no track names, no visual information), and the transport controls either work just for basic play and stop, or not at all. Yet some flash-based players do seem to work fine, such as the BBC radio 4 player.
Also, I have had flash completely crash my browser several times a day recently, when clicking on a related video in youtube. This flakey behaviour happens in Safari (latest version), Firefox (also latest) and Chrome (yes, latest version too).
My system is completely up to date with the most recent OSX version, and all of the security updates, Pro Kit and Pro App Support. I regularly repair permissions, and I regularly run system maintenance routines and cron scripts via a 3rd party support app.
My latest attempt to fix the problem:
I downloaded the flash player uninstaller from Adobe, made sure that all apps were closed and ran the uninstaller. I then repaired permissions and restarted. After restarting, I installed the latest Flash for OSX, then repaired permissions straight after. When I did this, I saw that disk utility made a list as long as my arm of permissions that it repaired, almost all of them related to Flash.. so I figured this might be a good sign. I ran repair permissions a 2nd time just to see if it had missed anything, but on the 2nd time round, there was nothing more to be repaired. Still, as an extra precaution, I restarted again before attempting to launch a browser. Upon restart, I opened Safari and went straight to youtube. Sure enough, no change whatsoever. The very same problem still exists in exactly the same way as before.
I've had this trouble for a long time now, and I'm getting tired of trying to fix it. I like watching youtube content but I hardly do so anymore, because being unable to pause and resume viewing makes it a more annoying experience than its worth most of the time, not to mention the browser crashes. My Snow Leopard install was painstakingly undertaken from scratch - I used to have Tiger on this machine, but installed a brand new 500GB internal drive to do a completely fresh install of OSX when I made the move to Snow Leopard late last year.
I'm no novice to managing Macs - as I said before, I do all of the maintenance routines regularly.. but this problem just won't go away. I'm starting to suspect that there's so much bad blood on the whole Flash issue with Apple and Adobe that it wouldn't surprise me if they're intentionally making the whole thing flakey just to make users like me hate Flash more and more.. so that we'll be happy to see it condemned to history and won't miss it on things like the iPad.
I've never been a fan of Flash, and like everyone I think it's ridiculous how much it winds up the fans and hogs the CPU on my MBP just to play a silly little video. So sure, I'll be happy when no one uses it anymore. But for now, I actually would like to have it working because like it or not, it's the reality for youtube and a number of other sites.. I don't see why it should be so consistently buggy on my system when I have the very latest updates of everything and I religiously manage my computer to keep it in great shape. I work professionally using Logic Pro on this very same computer, and in every way apart from Flash, the machine is in tip-top condition.
If anyone can tell me what the h*ll I can do to fix this, I'm all ears. In the meantime, I'll probably reserve a genius bar appointment to look into this.. but I've been to the genius bar before only to find that the 'genius' was less skilled at Mac maintenance than I am. So I won't be surprised if I'm sent home with the usual knee-jerk reaction advice - 'zap your P-RAM and reinstall OSX'. If that's the best they can do, then I'm just going to live with the problem because as I said earlier, my system is performing brilliantly in every other way. There is no way I'm going to put myself through all the reinstall process for all of my professional apps, reauthorizing dozens of plug ins etc etc, just to fix this problem. For the professional work I do, this computer is finely-tuned and running like a dream. In fact, I find it hard to believe that there might be something fundamentally wrong with my system that a reinstall would fix - purely because if there was something wrong deep down in the system, then the suite of professional apps that I use for work would surely be showing problems much more than a meagre little application/plug in like Flash.
Anyway, if anyone can think of anything that I may have missed, I'd love to hear about it.
Cheers.

Answer 1

Hi, thanks for the input everyone.
Rather than trying to take quotations from multiple posts, I'll attempt to answer all of the pertinent questions you all brought up without going from quote to quote.
In terms of which browser - as I said in my original post, I have 3 - Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Same problem is experienced in each. I just tested them again (literally right now) after having done the very thorough uninstall/reinstall of Flash, and it's still as dodgy as ever. I have to admit I've only ever seen a browser crash (caused by Flash) in Safari, but that's probably only because Safari is the browser I use most and am never in the other browsers long enough to let Flash decide to explode.
As for launching Safari in 32 bit mode.. you got me excited there for a moment cos I thought that indeed maybe I was in 64 bit mode and my problem could be over.. but alas, I checked and there it was, that 32 bit box was already ticked. Sigh.
I've tried to backtrack this problem to see if I can rule out whether it was a new thing since Snow Leopard or not. Then I decided to actually test this, because I still have a bootable clone of my Tiger system exactly as it was the day I moved to Snow Leopard. Booting from that system, I was reminded that yes.. I had problems with Flash under Tiger as well. Similarly, it was somewhat arbitrary with some sites working fine, others not so fine. Some youtube videos would have strange transport control issues, others none at all. But upon checking, the problem was not exactly the same.. In my current system, it seems like a great deal more youtube videos don't work properly, and the way in which it plays up is worse now than it was before. Example: in Tiger, I would regularly have youtube videos where I could never click somewhere in the timeline and have the video play from that point. If I tried to do that, it would just jump back to the beginning and start playing all over. In Snow Leopard (notably with TED Talks videos, but with many others too), not only is this also the case, but I never can use the play/pause button because it just jumps back to the beginning every time. Also, mousing over the transport area, I get a weird white/grey box in the space where those transparent ads should be. And then, in both Tiger and Snow Leopard, I occasionally get a situation where the transport bar will just go crazy, moving really fast as if the video is like 3 seconds long and then jumping back to the start and jumping all over the place. But the video itself plays normally, except of course that you can't pause it, jump to a different place in time or whatever. And to top it off, it's usually a sign that Flash is going to do its best to bring down my whole browser some time soon.
Anyway thanks again for the pointers. I've also emptied the cache a few times in my browsers, no luck either. Frankly I'm pretty much over wasting time getting this to work - given that my system is in pristine condition, regularly maintained and totally up-to-date, I'd find it very strange if no one else was experiencing some youtube videos behaving in this way too. It seems like there must be a fundamental bug or series of bugs in there somewhere that no matter what I do, I'm not going to be able to get around until the people responsible actually fix them.
Thanks for the heads up on the HTML 5 youtube site! I've just signed up for that and checked some of my regular youtube content that I watch.. It WORKS PERFECTLY! Brilliant. I think I'm going to consider this problem solved now, because I'm so turned off by Flash that I'm now quite happy to see it die a well-deserved death, the faster the better. Like I hinted at earlier, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was all some top-secret machiavellian plan from Apple HQ.. I doubt they'd go as far as to intentionally kneecap Flash so that it doesn't work and drives users to hate it so much that they start pushing everyone to move to alternatives. But I bet it's just as easy to not bother putting in the effort to bug-fix, because in the end you get the same result. In my profession, Digidesign do exactly the same thing with their hardware - it works flawlessly like golden molten butter when you use it with their own software. But the minute you use it with something else, it's so dicey that end users could easily be convinced that it's the other software that's badly written... It seems to be a valid (if sneaky) strategy used by the technology industry these days to nudge users in the direction they want them to go...
Anyway thanks a lot for that advice. It was mainly only youtube that was driving me nuts, so now that I can use it without Flash, I might even totally remove it from my system. Too bad for MySpace, but whatever..
Cheers!