Typically, Flash9b.ocx errors are caused by attempting to load a corrupt or missing ActiveX control (Object Linking and Embedding control) associated with Shockwave Flash. Replacing your OCX file is generally a solution to fixing these issues. Moreover, as an overall cleanup and preventive measure, we recommend using a registry cleaner to cleanup any invalid file, OCX file extension, or registry key entries to prevent related error messages.
Because the Flash installer has never removed older versions of the program. The first time I ran the Secunia Software Inspector I almost fell off my chair at the huge list of old versions of the Flash player that were hanging around. Those old versions were flagged by Secunia because they had security vulnerabilities (a nice word for bug, which is itself, a nice word for a mistake by a programmer).
Flash Player Ocx Control 9.0
As I blogged about yesterday, this is now an important issue because the latest version of the Flash player fixes nine bugs, some of them critical (Adobe's term, not mine). Simply viewing a Web page can infect your machine, so removing the old buggy versions of Flash is important.
Even in the best of times, the Flash player is particularly annoying to upgrade because it has to be done twice, once for Internet Explorer and then again for Firefox. The player comes packaged as an ActiveX control ("control" is nerd talk for "program") for IE and as a "plug-in" for Firefox.
You can see this is the screenshot above from the Secunia Software Inspector, which shows both versions of the latest Flash player. The .ocx file at the top is the ActiveX version; the .dll file at the bottom is the plug-in version. As you can see, both files normally reside in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\Macromed\Flash\
One computer in particular desperately resisted being updated to the latest version of the Flash player. I eventually got it working, however. So if anything similar happens to you, you may find a helpful tip below. The problematic machine was running the latest version of Firefox (2.0.0.11) and Windows XP with all bug fixes applied.
But I figured the acid test was to visit a Web site that uses Flash, so I browsed around Yahoo.com a bit. Lo and behold, Firefox was able to display the Flash-based ads. Both the Adobe uninstaller and Secunia had failed to locate the copy of the Flash player that Firefox was using. Nice work, guys.
At this point I figured I'd just install the new Flash player and be on my way to the next machine. So I went to the Flash player download center and downloaded an EXE to install the plug-in version of Flash for Firefox. The install ran successfully as shown above (I can't show all the messages because the window is not re-sizeable).
This I truly did not expect. After all, I had uninstalled the Flash player, installed it successfully and renamed the file it might have been picking up by mistake. Despite all this, it kept using the old version. But from where? Can you guess?
Adobe bug: Its uninstaller program did not uninstall the Flash player being used by Firefox. It missed the player used by both the normally installed copy of Firefox and by two portable versions of Firefox.
Not to mention the nine bugs in the Flash player that kicked off this endeavor. And not being able to use the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs applet in Windows XP to remove the Flash player. It works for everyone else, why not for Flash? All this is made even worse by the fact that Flash and Firefox are mature, popular products.
When you distribute a Microsoft Visual FoxPro application that uses an ActiveX control (.ocx file), the .ocx file must be registered correctly for it to work correctly. The Visual FoxPro Setup Wizard or InstallShield Express in Visual FoxPro 7.0 or a later version of Visual FoxPro will register an .ocx file correctly, provided that you select the OLE check box in Step 6 for the .ocx file. If a Visual FoxPro application that uses an .ocx file is distributed by some other method, the .ocx file must be registered manually. This article describes how to register an .ocx file manually. 2ff7e9595c
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