Could you try this troubleshooting article: Adobe Flash plugin has crashed - Prevent it from happening again. Does anything there help?

It suddenly started working again this morning, not quite sure as to why it had the problem to begin with... I tried restarting my computer a while after posting the question but to no luck, so I don't think turning it off and starting it this morning fixed it although there may be a chance. I'm completely baffled.

If and when this problem appears again I'll be sure to try to test this theory and also downgrade my version of Flash player and Firefox.

I too had been having this issue for awhile.. originally i thought it was a faulty hard drive (it was faulty and after a reformat on a different drive the issue disapeared).. however it has recently started happening again..

i would load a Folder of links (generally 3 links at a time for stuff i check everyday).. and if a site had Flash on it the program would hang and i had to kill via Task manager or wait a very very very long time..

i have recently uninstalled Firefox.. reinstalled and then checked plugins.. it would say Flash was out of date so i got its installer ran it.. but when Firefox reloads for the test page it freezes nearly instantly.. making me believe its a Flash issue

Hi ljmjollnir, what versions of Windows and Flash? If you have Windows 7 or Vista, try disabling the new protected mode in Flash 11.3, since that feature is currently being debugged. See this support article from Adobe under the heading "Last Resort": Adobe Forums: How do I troubleshoot Flash Player's protected mode for Firefox?

Also, if the updater tells you 11.3 is out of date, Firefox may have detected and loaded a second, older version of Flash. You might be able to see that here:

orange Firefox button or classic Tools menu > Add-ons > Plugins category

I72600k,Asrock E3G3, 16gig Ram, 2TB HDD, ATI 6950 (Reference board) Win 7 x64, Flash installed 11.3.300.271(Disabled), Firefox 14.0.1 Yesterday i uninstalled Flash using the uninstaller i downloaded from a link in another topic(Adobe forums) ..

i tried to download an archived version of 10.2 flash but couldnt see a way to install it all i had was an RMS file and it was getting late so didnt put much research into it

i will try disabling the proctected mode in a few mins an see how that goes.. it was kind of random most of the time.. but yesterday it was happening everytime..

i suspect (after reading some other forums) that there might be an issue with ATI drivers running some games in windowed mode and something not getting cleaned up properly as thinking back most of the time i can think of it happening was after playing some games on Steam or watching videos in steam.. once i narrow it down ill post more.. in the past Flash/Firefox has worked after a reboot.

Disabling protected mode seems to be working... i havent had a crash since i disabled it.. but i also havent done much on the computer since i did it...

Disabling the ProtectedMode resolves the hanging problem indeed. However, it replaces it with another problem, I seen before:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745433

mouse clicking becomes unreliable in the Flash. It just cannot handle mouse properly when controls are small (yet large enough for the human to easily point over them precisely). I had to zoom the page to make flash capturing the mouse events properly.

Developers say that it is a Flash problem but none exist when I run the Flash in IE.

Now, I have realized that my too high Windows 7 screen resolution (custom text size of 200% = 192 DPI) or DPI virtualization used to achieve that can be a problem for many video applications http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/get-a-better-view-in-windows-7-by-adjusting-dpi-scaling/5404 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd940516%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

It seems that not only Firefox freezes, some MS products also suffer from the same, DPI virtualization, problem http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9663585/vs2010-stuck-freeze-in-any-kind-of-scrolling

And the solution used thereby, to "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" in Firefox shortcut -> Properties -> Compatibility also fixes both the freezing and broken mouse problem! So, try FF compatibility before blaming the Adobe Flash Protected Mode. I think that it is a FF bug because it does not exist in IE and FF is an "older program".

Your argument that it must be a bug in Firefox because it seems to work fine in IE is not evidence. IE uses a ActiveX version of Flash and Firefox uses a Other version that almost all other modern browsers uses or can use, and Adobe complicated things by adding in Protected mode just for Firefox on Windows. Adobe has admitted to causing problems and has been trying to fix ever since they released the first 11.3 release of Flash for Windows.

example: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4498459

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html Note the #2

May be you're right. Protected mode=0 means that Flash runs in the browser process and we see no freezing here assumingly because Firefox configures Compatibility mode properly whereas ProtectedMode=1 makes the Flash a separate process, which freezes because the default Compatibility flag is not inherited. Then, we should report this observation to Adobe.

However, I experience the mouse problem when ProtectedMode=0, when Flash is embedded in the Firefox process. Now, since Compatibility flag can solve the problem, I admit that it is Firefox that does not handle the Virtual DPI mode properly.

Thanks for your consideration. I want other people to check if ProtectedMode=0 causes the mouse problems and if Compatibility flag solves both.