DuracellEnergizer said:

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.

Have you checked through google to see if there are any forums or boards where someone had the same issue that maybe found a fix? That typically helps me.