@Daniel Beardsmore said:
What the smeg is wrong with Adobe, exactly?
Abridged answer; the fact that they're still in business.
Flash Player isn't even the worst of their cockups. Have a little look at the licensing problems people get with their Creative Suite some time; licenses randomly expiring, reverting back to a trial version, being downgraded from a 'premium' to a 'regular', etc.
There are paying customers (paying way too much btw. because with Adobe's monopoly position they can pretty much charge whatever the fuck they want) being told by support to just uninstall, run a cleaner tool (that uninstalls additional stuff the uninstaller doesn't; WTF!) and then reinstall their product. Does the problem reoccur at a later time? You are advised to run through those steps again (ofcourse). Does it not solve the problem? They don't have a working solution for you; well, other than buying the new version of their software with another license and praying that one doesn't sponteneaously self-combust either...
I had a problem like the above not too long ago with Flash Builder*, where every 30 days it would report a Creative Suite 6 license as expired, though Photoshop and other programs covered by the license would be fine. Eventually I got a hint out of an old post on a random web forum** to check the license verification logs.
As it turned out, my particular version of Flash Builder was dual licensed for the Creative Suite 5.5 and Creative Suite 6 bundles. The license verification logs showed it starting with some type of collection phase, scanning for license types. Since I had a CS6 installation only, it would find licensing for CS6 and would report some default empty data for the CS5.5 license. Then it would start the actual verification phase. The CS 5.5 license data would be treated first and would ofcourse fail (since it was some bogus empty data only). Rather than continuing with the next set of license data (for CS6), the verification component would bail out entirely on the first failing license, leaving you with a license-state of 'expired' or 'invalid'. For bonus points; failing the startup license check puts Flash Builder into trial mode, but it does so silently, as the part of the Flash Builder UI that shows the Activated/Deactived state of the license does work correctly and reports the program as having an active license...
The trick to solving all that? Activate CS6's license by starting Flash Builder; the logs would then reveal the CS6 license to have been positioned at the head of the queue, before the CS5.5 license and everything would 'work'. If you'd have started up Photoshop or other parts of the Creative Suite and had (re)activated the license through them instead, then 30 days later you'd be SoL again.
I wonder if this fluke in their license verification would also explain the past problems some people would have with side-by-side installations of different Creative Suites, or would explain the problems with version upgrades...
*) Don't ask; have some old Flash stuff my employer needs to continue to support for clients that demand fancy web stuff works in IE8 and below as well, bla bla... web development drama... yada yada...
**) Adobe's own community forums are ofcourse about as helpful as you'd expect them to be for these kind of things; i.e. , not at all.