Earlier this afternoon, I downloaded an swf file and tried to play it, but it wouldn't open -- apparently, I didn't have Adobe Flash Player installed (this is spite of the fact that on-line Flash content seemed to operate just fine for me).

So, I decided to reinstall Flash. When I tried, however, it kept aborting, giving me the message that "Flash Player failed to register" or something like that.

Well, I figured maybe I should uninstall Flash before reinstalling it, so I did. However, not only did the download fail again, but I was no longer able to view Flash content -- like YouTube videos -- online. Now I started to worry.

So, I spent the next couple of hours reinstalling and re-uninstalling Flash over-and-over again, trying different methods to get it to work. Each attempt failed with the same damn results: "Flash Player failed to register" "ActiveX control failed to register", etc, etc.

So, in the end, I used System Restore to reset the computer back to the way it was before I started monkeying around with the sonuvabitch.

Suffice it to say, not only am I mad as heck, but I'm afraid of what will happen if I need to update my Flash software in the future.