Flash is one of those must have additions to your Operating System. Spend any time on the web and you will inevitably come across a site that requires it. Unfortunately many people have had problems with Flash on Vista. Adobe has addressed these issues with a Vista compatible update.

Installation issues were one complaint. As noted here, after installing flash you’d be prompted to install it again. This came down to a problem with Vista’s new security model preventing the installer from doing everything it needed. Here’s another post that talks about the issue.

I’m also certain that I saw a number of people reporting problems with Flash videos pausing and stuttering, though I can’t find any of them to reference now. Personally, I haven’t had any problems with Flash (I was tipped off to the problem/solution by this post), though I’m using Firefox, so perhaps most of the issues are IE7 related, due to ActiveX no longer being available in Vista.

These problems can occur if you are running an older version of Flash, which could be possible if you upgraded (yet another reason to ALWAYS do a clean install). Adobe released an update to Flash, 9,0,28,0 in November. It makes Flash Vista compatible, and should resolve these issues. I just installed it on a fresh install of Vista Business and it worked flawlessly. I don’t have an upgrade machine I can test the upgrade to Flash on, so if you’re in this situation, please try upgrading and let us know how it goes!