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batsona
Maryland
join:2004-04-17
Ellicott City, MD

batsona

Member

[Other] Shockwave Flash may be busy or has stopped responding....

Greetings -- I was wondering if there is any accepted fix to the error message in the subject line. It's accompanied with the HD thrashing, and the browser stops responding. There's a continue button on this dialog box, then when you click it, it will return you to normal operation. I've looked myself but all postings everywhere are from back in 2013, and they all say, "yeah, I have that problem too!"

The forums at Adobe are all filled with people who are currently arguing if "Adobe Flash" is the same thing as "Shockwave Flash", so there's nothing constructive going on over there.

I wanted to see if there was a consensus fix for this, short of investigating for myself for 4 hours.
BlitzenZeus
Burnt Out Cynic
Premium Member
join:2000-01-13

2 recommendations

BlitzenZeus

Premium Member

You didn't even give us the basics like your system(windows version, processor, memory, gpu), if you have the latest version, and the browser(s) you're using. When it's running what does task manager, and/or resource monitor say about your memory/physical memory usage. Also flash, and shockwave are two different programs fyi.

Hdd usage in this case might be you're running out of physical memory, and your programs now have to use the pagefile as memory, otherwise possibly some program is accessing the hdd causing it to hang other processes, even possibly the hdd going bad so it's causing software to hang reading/writing to sectors.
batsona
Maryland
join:2004-04-17
Ellicott City, MD

batsona

Member

I have the same behaviour on 4 different PCs actually. --So that rules out the hardware; they all have plenty of RAM. Investigations I've done, are saying that different fixes work for different people, and that it may be related to Video card driver. --I've disabled HW-acceleration in the browser, and in the Flash player, and it doesn't help. We're using the newest Firefox ESR version, and the latest Flash version. Normally, flash works OK, but at some point when you click on a flash object, the browser does nothing, and you look down and see the HD light glowing solid "Oh boy, here it comes....", and sure enough BOOM.. there's the error. You click continue, and then the browser proceeds normally after a few moments. ARG.... Steve Jobs was correct in avoiding Flash like the Plague....

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

aurgathor to batsona

Member

to batsona
Flash is buggy. One "fix" is exiting and then re-starting your browser.
If the browser is unresponsive, sometimes killing Flash from "Task Manager" can help. Other times you just have to kill the browser. In other words, there is no real fix.

In any case, Flash is close to being EOL-d and it will be replaced by HTML5.
quote:
The forums at Adobe are all filled with people who are currently arguing if "Adobe Flash" is the same thing as "Shockwave Flash", so there's nothing constructive going on over there.
LOL

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

Yeah Flash is the Devil - not much you can do about it other than making sure you have the latest version: »www.adobe.com/software/f ··· h/about/

One thing I've found is every invocation of a Flash script will eat memory, so having multiple tabs and/or multiple browser windows running something that uses Flash increases your chance of a Flash lock-up exponentially.

As aurgathor See Profile says, closing the browser (completely) should kill it, but sometimes you may have to resort to the Task Mgr.

And... this is not a Microsoft issue.

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

aurgathor

Member

said by Wily_One:

Yeah Flash is the Devil - not much you can do about it other than making sure you have the latest version: »www.adobe.com/software/f ··· h/about/

Well, there are add-ons that can disable, block or replace it.

»addons.mozilla.org/en-US ··· disable/
»addons.mozilla.org/en-US ··· shblock/
»addons.mozilla.org/en-US ··· o-flash/

Wily_One
Premium Member
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

Wily_One

Premium Member

I presume the OP wants to actually use Flash, and have it work more reliably, not disable it.
batsona
Maryland
join:2004-04-17
Ellicott City, MD

batsona

Member

OP here: Correct -- as long as I have flash objects that need to run, I'll need flash. The fault can't be 100% flash's -- My wife plays games all the time, and her flash has crashed once in 6 months. However, I need to do a study on what games each person in my family plays, and whether they actually use Flash. Just now, I saw my wife playing "2020 MyCountry" thru Facebook, and "FlashPlugin_Container" is not running. ---It's HTML5 maybe....

Also, it's worth noting that when Flash freezes, and puts up that error, it never crashes -- it just takes a dirt-nap for 10-15 seconds, then wakes up & performs fine. My original question could be better be defined: 1.)What is [a] website requiring of Flash, that makes it croak for 15seconds? and 2.)I'm guessing Flash should be able to honor this hefty request -- why does Flash go to sleep when this certain hefty task is asked of it? (I know, I think only a Flash Developer can answer these -- but what they heck -- I can ask anyway
Frodo
join:2006-05-05

1 edit

Frodo

Member

I managed to break Flash the other day. I was stopping "unneeded" services, and decided to disable "IP Helper service" since I don't use IPv6. Then, when watching Hulu, Flash froze at the first commercial break. I restarted IP Helper service and Flash again worked flawlessly.

That's only one of of probably a hundred ways to break flash.

Edit: The Event Viewer, System log was producing this unhelpful entry.
quote:
The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{B019E3BF-E7E5-453C-A2E4-D2C18CA0866F}
and APPID
Unavailable
to the user Default2\User SID (S-1-5-21-1830351002-1963024219-1....) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.
After the fact analysis, B019E3BF-E7E5-453C-A2E4-D2C18CA0866F was flash, and APPID Unavailable was probably the missing IP Helper service. However my resolution was to undo recent changes until the problem was resolved.

However, in your case, the event viewer may contain a useful entry.

aurgathor
join:2002-12-01
Lynnwood, WA

aurgathor to batsona

Member

to batsona
There are websites that start several instances of flash in a single page, and the cumulative effect of that is cannot be good, especially if you like to keep windows opened. What you see can be explained with major swao file trashing, so
a) add more memory
b) get a new 64 bit sytem with lots of memory
c) use a really fast HD such as an SSD as your main HD
d) use a dedicated swap drive, preferably an SSD or a RAM drive (i-RAM)
e) enable flash only in windows where you really need it
batsona
Maryland
join:2004-04-17
Ellicott City, MD

batsona to Frodo

Member

to Frodo
I'll try enabling IP Helper again -- I know I have it disabled. Otherwise, I'm politely resisting the notion that my 4 PCs that are suffering this same problem are all old 32-bit machines that are low on RAM and have slow disks.
Frodo
join:2006-05-05

Frodo

Member

Well, if it is IP Helper, you should be seeing the same kind of messages I found in Event Viewer, Window logs, System