Last week I had a weird thing happen. Firefox is my browser of choice, but I still use IE for testing and whenever I want to get really frustrated about css. Thus, I’m used to the normal weirdness that occurs when you jump from FF to IE to check a design, but I was surprised last week to see that the Flash player appeared to have uninstalled itself. “Weird” I thought, and simply went and installed it again from adobe.com. It appeared to install normally, and even played the “successful install” video. However, it was still not working, and upon closing IE and opening it back up the Adobe page still thought I didn’t have it installed.

I’m not sure what caused this to happen, but in case it has happened to you, I finally found a fix after about 60 minutes of messing around and trying different things.

Here is what you need to do:

1- Close all your programs
2- Open up your “Add/Remove Programs” window from the control panel
3- Uninstall anything that says “Flash Player”. I had 3 files. One had to do with Active X. The other 2 were called Flash Player 9 something or other.
4- Visit adobe.com in both IE and FF to reinstall the plugin.

Like I said, I’m not sure what causes this Flash player bug in IE, but I do know that I was able to remedy it by using those steps.

Good luck!