If you’ve ever installed Flash Professional on your computer you know it has that nasty habit of overwriting your debug Flash Player (ActiveX) with its own mutant half-debug version. I don’t normally mind, because the plugin version is not affected and I use Opera (which is awesome, by the way). But I started noticing Flash Builder errors whenever I would open a project and try to debug it. Once you close and reopen Flash Builder, you can freely debug that project. The error is caused by the failure to write into the FlashPlayerTrust file and it gets annoying after a while.
Because I am constantly installing/uninstalling/reinstalling prerelease versions of Flash Professional CS5, I frequently run into this problem. So I have to install the “real deal” debug version of Flash Player after each Flash Pro reinstall, which I know is not the recommended approach but it’s the fastest one. Today I wanted to try Flash Player 10.1 beta 3 and I got an error that said:
The version of Adobe Flash Player ActiveX that you are trying to install is not the most current version.
LOL, WUT?
After countless tries and retries and googling and hair pulling I found the solution and it lies within TechNotes kb402435 and tn_14157. What you have to do is download the Adobe Flash Player uninstaller and run
uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean
from the command line.
Then all you have to do is install the desired version of Flash Player and you’re good to go!