Adobe and Google – you two have caused me lots of pain this
week and have cost me more hours than I want to think about.
At the beginning of the week, Adobe released an update to
their flash player. They moved to
11.4.402.265. Embedded in the update was
an installation for Google Chrome. Done
these updates probably a hundred times, and I had not yet missed a checkbox to uncheck
said box for some new tool bar or software package. But, I must have missed this one.
I immediately uninstalled Chrome. But, my problems just snowballed. Chrome does not like to be uninstalled. It made registry entries that were the death
of my operating system. First, I noticed
hyperlinks failed in MS Excel spreadsheets.
Researching, I found it a common problem for anyone that uninstalls Chrome. A system recovery said it failed, but it did
fix the links.
However, another problem was also introduced at the time of
the incident. I could not print. I could print to PDF without issue. But, I could not print to any network
printers. The other computers on the
network had no issues. But, no matter
the network printer, I couldn’t print to it on my primary CPU. I uninstalled the printer software and
reinstalled. No luck. Further attempts at manual registry
corrections and/or recovery of system settings to prior synchronization periods
failed to correct the problem.
Mindfully, I have three back-up systems. A full system image and two application data
back-up systems. I had no choice but to
try and recover from the full system image first, as it would at least give me
everything I had previously, and I would merely need to update the data files
with one of the other back-ups. But,
each attempt failed. The computer was
incapable of rebuilding the disk drive with the backed up system images. The initial attempt went the farthest, and
the system almost came up. Though it
could operate in Safe Mode, user profiles were completely corrupted. Subsequent attempts failed, to the point
where the C drive would not format and the computer booted into a screen that
said “No Operating System could be found”.
Through a system recovery USB memory stick, in combination
with one CD, I was able to rebuild the computer as delivered from the factory. At least I had a computer. With 102 windows updates, followed by about 5
reboots for smaller numbers of updates… I was finally current on Windows. But, now I had a ton of software to
load. A few applications, I had the box
and the accompanying installation CD.
But most applications were downloaded from online purchases into a
folder. And, the backup system only kept
some of those. That meant digging
through email and locating each vendor and re-downloading their software, and
using their various security keys to activate.
I’m not finished installing software yet. And, at least one of my most relied on
software applications is no longer supported.
So, I have a database with no application to drive it.
Turns out, Adobe asked to update the Flash player to
11.4.402.265 again. And, this time I
made sure I did not check the box for Chrome.
Apparently, Adobe did a terrible job testing this version. It slows IE 9 to a crawl (unless you disable
the add-in). We’re talking about 10
minutes to load a page that otherwise comes up in a couple of seconds. I
located Technical Forums, of which Adobe is participating and gathering
information, which had threads starting August 21 for this topic. There, users described similar issues with IE
performance and Adobe provided information to their archive for older versions,
and a link to an uninstall program to clean the registry so that the install
doesn’t fail with a message telling you there is a newer version out
there. Forum users agreed that rolling
back fixed their issues.
With the rollback to version 11.3.300.271, all is back to
normal for my browser. I wish I could
say the same for the time I lost, and the work that is still in front of me for
applications not yet recovered. Glad I
decided not to accept the version upgrade on the other computers in the
house. I hope that the next release of
Adobe fixes the issue. I’ll have to wait
a week and watch the forums to see if it’s good for an install.
