Hey Guys,
I was having this weired problem with IE 7 on Windows Vista for quiet a few months, and i resolved it today. i'm posting it here, may it be of some help for someone...
I am a IE 7 user on Windows Vista. For the last 2 months i was having a weired sort of problem with my IE browser. The problem was with Flash Player 9 control. Whenever i use to visit a site with flash videos on it, the sites use to report me that i dont have flash player installed and i was always given a link to install it from the adobe site. But even after downloading the latest version and installing it, the same error happened. On the weirder side, after installation everytime, the adobe site showed a flash animation and said that the plugin was installed. But it didnt showed up on furthur restarts of IE. When i used the Add-On manager of IE, it showed that even while opening a page with flash content the flash plugin was not loaded by IE. I tried re-registering the ocx file using regsvr32.exe but no avail. I tried loosening some security settings but nothing happened. I consulted some tech forums but nobody was able to answer. I dont have any spyware, adware or virus on my system, thats for sure. I double checked all the BHOs and the processes that are running inside my computer.
Enough for the problems, now the solution.
Today i was wandering around in dark in my C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash folder and i found out two executables there, FlashUtil9d.exe and NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe. I ran them, they downloaded about 1.8 MB of data each from the internet and that virtually refreshed the folder totally. After that, i am able to run flash videos from anysite with all the default security settings enabled.
I dont exactly know what happened behined the scene, but it did solved my problem. So if somebody else is having such kind of problem. Try it. :-)