Why is it impossible to select options in the flash player settings

Question

I just installed FP 11.8.800. and tried to activate a camera for a netStream. When the flsh player settings panel came up, none of the buttons responded to mouse clicks in Firefox or Chrome. It does not work either if you tab through and try to activate the highlighed option with enter. What is wrong with it? Working on an Asus G73 64 bit laptop

Answer 1

Unfortunately, one of the security threats that we face in the modern security landscape is an attack against the browser and plug-in user interface called ClickJacking.
In short, we have to do a bunch of math and guessing to ensure that the clicks on the buttons in the settings manager are authentic, and not a result of someone tricking you into clicking by obscuring the dialog by placing something innocuous-looking on top of it, or programmatically generating the clicks.  When you click on that box, we actually take a screenshot of the region, compare it against what we believe is rendered there, and if the two don't match, we don't accept the click.
Because we're not directly getting the input (the browser gets it and passes it along to us), we have imperfect insight into the origin and nature of the events that get passed in.  This is one of those classic "garbage in, garbage out" situations.
The optimal solution would be to let the browser handle all of the user interface stuff because it does have authoritative insight, but there are a whole set of reasons (mostly backwards compatibility and platform fragmentation related) for why that isn't feasible in the short-term. 
The problem is typically that you have a video playing, or something moving underneath the dialog such that the pixels around the dialog have changed between when you clicked and when we do that authenticity comparison, or there's a subtle rounding bug in the math that only happens at a specific resolution.  Changing your resolution temporarily will usually get you around the problem, but we're not saying that it's a good solution. 
If you can tell me what your display resolution is, and point me to the website where you're having the problem, I'll try and reproduce it and get a bug filed.
Also, there is frequently an "active" spot on the button in this situation, but it's too small.  If you just try clicking around all over the button, and/or launching the settings manager in a different spot so that the stuff around the dialog window is less likely to change over time, you can probably get around it without changing resolutions.
Thanks!