11th December 2001

There's nothing wrong with wanting a little Flash animation in your life (or in your Web browser). Lockergnomie Paul McNeely was having a problem with the world's most popular plug-in a few weeks ago. The software was already installed, but Internet Explorer didn't believe it. "I went to Web sites that would check for Flash and they would spit back an error page with a link to Macromedia. I clicked on the link and tried to install the player, but since it had already been installed, I saw the 'everything is working properly' animation." He started fishing around on his hard drive, and eventually found his way to the C:\ Windows \ System \ Macromed \ Flash directory. Well, Paul deleted the "swflash.ocx" file that was sitting inside there (his Flash directory). This allowed him to return to Macromedia's site and install the software (again) properly. It also returned full functionality to those Flash-enabled sites. As a side note, Windows 2000 and XP users will find most of their "system" stuff now sitting inside the System32 folder.