I finally solved the mystery of broken Flash by downgrading to Flash 10.0.12.36

Question

I'm one of the many users who seems to be having trouble with Flash these days. I solved my issue by downgrading to Flash 10.0.12.36, and I think I figured out why it was happening. I use Firefox 9.0.1, and I believe Flash incorrectly detected this and silently pushed an incompatible new version. Gee, thanks Adobe.
Note: Flash 10.0.12.36 detected my Opera installation but not my Firefox installlation, but manually copying the files from Opera's plugins folder to Firefox's worked fine.
Additional Note: No, I will not upgrade. Stop typing, close your mouth. Don't even start. Take it somewhere else - preferably to another browser's dev team. Firefox has fallen long and hard since the glory days of 1.x, and 9.0.1 is the final usable version of Firefox for me. If you put half as much effort into backporting security fixes to old versions as you put into yelling at people to upgrade, you might have a happy userbase instead of a confused, angry, rapidly shrinking one. It's not the easiest way to build a product, but when was the moral high road ever easy? From my point of view, the browser's job is to unquestioningly enable content. You want to add restrictions and security? That is what addons are for. I have absolutely zero fear of running old versions; between addons and using about:config to excise unwanted Firefox features, nothing suspicious ever gets a chance to become active. I frequent some of the scariest, most infected places on the web and I have not been infected since the 90's. So I do not need to upgrade. You need to downgrade, and get back in touch with your alienated former users, who want a modern browser that looks and acts like Firefox 1.x and would rather scrap a proposed feature entirely than break a single addon.
OK, I feel much, much better now. Time to go watch some Youtube!

Answer 1

You may wish to note that at least some of the problems on any Windows system after Windows XP could relate to the use of FlashPlayers protected mode.
Some users may wish to employ the most recent version of Flash Player that will work on their sytem. in which case it could be worth trying an up-to-date version of FlashPlayer but with protected mode disabled.
The setting is changeable by editing a file ( adding the line ProtectedMode=0 to the Flash "mms.cfg" file) and instructions may be found in these articles
* http://kb.mozillazine.org/Flash#Flash_Player_11.3_Protected_Mode_-_Windows <br /> Probably an interesting reference article to scroll through regarding Flash Problems with Firefox
* http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1018071#TemporaryWorkaround<br/>Again an article with more Flash Player troubleshooting tips included