My new work PC developed an aversion to all things related to Adobe’s Flash and AIR earlier this week. Initially I thought it was just a Google Chrome / Flash issue. Then TweetDeck broke – it wouldn’t start up properly. Now, I don’t need TweetDeck on a work machine so that wasn’t too big of a deal, but I still had the issue where just about any page with Flash would hang and lock up Chrome.
Then I realized those same pages would lock up in Firefox and Internet Explorer as well. Then I tried some other AIR apps and found that none of them would start up either. OK, clearly I had an issue.
I uninstalled Flash and Air. I deleted all their data from their %appdata% folders. Reloaded and things worked – for a few hours or until the next reboot, then I’d be back to square one. Annoying.
This install is only a couple weeks old so I figured I’d just scrub it down and reload. Then I remembered the built-in Windows System Restore feature. I’ll admit I’ve never actually used System Restore before. In fact, I’ve often just disabled it, as it seemed more trouble than it was worth… For instance, it always seems to get in the way when cleaning up after viruses or malware.
This time, however, System Restore did the trick. I went back to the day before things went bad and now all the Flash and AIR stuff works just fine.
What caused the issue? That I still don’t know, but the leading contender is the HP web camera app that I had installed earlier in the week. That’s really the only change that isn’t related to Windows Update. I’m pondering if I should try to reload it and see what happens…
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January 30th, 2010 
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