Last week all my flash applications suddenly quit working. I tried several times to update flash, but with no success. I would download the player, click install, and upon completing installation it would send me back to a page requesting that I update. A mad circle. Felt like I was stuck in some twisted online merry go round. Unfortunately, I’ve been working on so many side projects (like antiquing a nativity set) that I didn’t have time to track down a solution.

Last night while I was sitting up in the middle of the night, I thought hey this would be a good chance to solve this. After a fe searches, I landed on Versiontracker with better troubleshooting advice than the Adobe troubleshooting section. If you have this problem with an Intel-based mac, here’s the advice I picked uu from Jim Kessler:

I’ve been working on a client’s machine where “you don’t have the Flash plug-in installed” appeared after installation and redirection to:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/index.html

Uninstalling and reinstalling had no effect. The solution? Repairing permissions with Disk Utlility. Then I ran the uninstaller (look on the Flash Player Support Center), and reran the installer, and everything worked.

BTW, check out versiontracker either way. It provides daily updates on software/freeware suff with comments (and troubleshooting tips).