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Odd flash problem - clicks stop working

Well, not really clicks... But first some background - noticed this happening on a site I work on last week. Two small flash animations that when clicked go to a different page of the site inexplicably stopped working. They still were animated - but nothing happened when they were clicked on. They hadn't been changed in over nine months.

So I replaced them with static images for the time being and started testing. Asked a coworker, and he brought up the page, and they worked for him! So for me, they didn't work in Firefox and IE on Windows XP. For him they did work on IE and Firefox, under linux.

After some digging around, we realized it was because he was using an older version of the flash plug-in than I was. We were both using 9.0, but I was using 9.0.0.124 and he was using 9.0.0.22 (if I recall). And then I recalled that I'd updated my flash plug-in a few weeks back while testing something else.

I wasn't sure what to do next, but while testing I noticed that if I downloaded the flash file to my desktop and viewed it directly in the browser, it worked. It was only on the page that it didn't work.

So, it runs out that it was the embedding code that broke it. Well, that broke it at some point for newer versions of the flash plug-in. Turns out you need to be sure that your method of embedding includes "allowscriptaccess" - which mine did not. It was W3C compliant, and had worked until that newer version of flash came out. I changed over to a non-compliant embedding code, and it started working again.

So, perhaps someone out there who runs into the same thing will see this and maybe save some time!

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