In the past few days suddenly my flash plugin has stopped working. I’ve tried fooling around with ActiveX controls, uninstalling and reinstalling it, and nothing works.
It’s been a years since I used MSIE except for special purposes, but somehow your description makes me think you’re using MSIE on Windows. Other browser/OSs tend to make a stronger distinction between “plugins” (machine code executables that are installed manually or automatically, like programs) and downloaded interpreted code like Java/ActiveX aplets that run in a “virtual sandbox”. A proper plug-in can do pretty much as it wishes, like any machine code executable (at least in Windows), but an ActiveX or Java applet has a more limited range that is meant to make them safe.
You should specify which OS and browser you’re on. For example, I had a long issue with Mozilla on Win2K periodically forgetting about Flash. After a year of upgrades, it refused to execute the Flash plugin at all. The solution wouldn’t apply to any other browser or many non-Win OSs. (My problem was caused by overwriting a v1.2 over an older install without uninstalling. This had not caused me any other problems, but was a ‘known issue’ in the docs. Once I’d made the error, it was perpetuated by later installs, which ordinarily didn’t require uninstalling.)
Registry entries and other OS/app vagaries can be inscrutable.
Oh, right. Internet Explorer 6.02 on Windows XP.