Vista + Flash + Protected Mode = CNET TV w/Choppy Video

In the last two weeks we've gotten a large number of reports of choppy video on CNET TV. The symptoms were so odd that I had to reproduce them myself before our engineers would believe them. Users have reported that they hear the audio on CNET TV just fine, but to get the video to play smoothly, users reported, "I have to move my mouse in circles."

The good news is we have narrowed this down to a bug that occurs in earlier versions of the Flash Player when running Windows Vista, with IE 7 in Protected Mode, with a site that has two Flash components that need to talk to each other. The not-as-good news is that we can't fix it on our side, but you can easily fix it on your side. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Uninstall the Flash player. You can download a small application from Adobe that will do this for you:

Flash Player Uninstaller

2. Install the latest version of the Flash Player.

Even if you have the latest version and you are having this problem, you'll need to uninstall it and reinstall it to solve the problem.

If this doesn't solve your problem, please let us know--either via the feedback link on CNET TV or in the comments here--and we'll try to help. Let us know:

1) What OS you are running?

2) Did you upgrade to that OS?

3) What browser and version do you use?

4) What version of Flash are you using? (Find your version of Flash here)