I have
1. Windows XP
2. IE browser 6.0

I applied Service Pack 2 to Windows XP and now

1. Flash player will not work in browser (and when you install from the Abode website, it says Flash 9.0 is already installed)

2. Photoshop 5.5 (yes, it is old) also stopped working, sort of. The application launches but then freezes up.

Interesting side note- both products now owned by Adobe.

Any other Windows users have any ideas?

These conflicts may seem odd but they're not atypical of what many users experienced when upgrading to XP SP2. You certainly did the right thing to upgrade for security reasons if nothing else.

First thing is ... make sure you have all the updates that came after SP2 installed. Run Windows Live Update to check.

You should upgrade to IE 7. I don't happen to care for it (as it's basically copycat Firefox and IMHO Firefox is better) but I don't believe MS supports v6 any more. (Correct me if I'm wrong, MS experts.) That conflict may very well have been intentionally unresolved on MS' part. If Flash Player still doesn't work after upgrading your browser, you might want to try uninstalling it and then re-installing the current version. If you have a Windows Registry cleaner, run it after uninstalling, before reinstalling.

I'm only familiar with Photoshop post-version 6. Again IIRC there are compatibility problems with older versions for some users on XP SP2. Again, sorry to say, but upgrading to 7 or a later version may be your best bet. Fortunately, upgrades for legit copies of Photoshop aren't nearly as financially painful as the initial investment.

Best of luck! Perhaps someone more savvy than I can help out here with more certainty.

Yes, I was updating for security reasons and to fix daylight savings time issue.

Now, I just updated to XP service pack 2 a week or two ago, but the Microsoft site had another 20 downloads available today. So I applied all of them.

Still no fix. And I upgraded browser to IE 7, still no fix.

Funny thing, when I go to Abode and install Flash, it says all is good.

But then, I can go to myspace.com and I can see messages on the page that say I do not have the latest version of Flash installed and need to go get it...

I am going to turn on automatic updates and see if I missed anything...

more later.

i can't really help much, but i know that when i installed service pack 2 on my pc i began to have all sorts of weird problems. i ended up uninstalling the whole thing, which in turn prolly lead to me getting a couple viruses, but oh well i couldn't stand how fucked my pc was after loading it. good luck on getting everything sorted out!

Okay, progress...

1. completely uninstalled Flash Player using Abode's uninstaller for Windows on their website
2. re-installed Flash Player and all is good!

I shall now try this logic on Photoshop and see if that fixes the problem!

Yea! Mad scientist logic works!

Photoshop 5.5 working again as well as Flash.

Perhaps, that is not a coincidence as both of these are Adobe products...

Adobe is evil.

Uh huh. Adobe.

Say what you will about either company, but Photoshop is Godlike.

There was also ana ctive X control update at MSN.com too-i was having several problems after my last auto update and loaded the active X update-took care of alll of my issues..

I have the same problem with adobe photoshop. It freezes when loading, so I cntrl+alt+del, and reopen the app and it works fine?

Weird I know but worth a try