The How-To Geek tipped me off to some odd behavior he noticed while taking Flash 10.1 beta for a spin. Every time he viewed Flash content in his browser, the disk would start thrashing with an alarming amount of access to NPSWF32.dll as pictured below.
After updating Flash, I fired up Process Monitor and confirmed his finding. Scary looking. Checking out the call stack for a few dozen entries, they all looked the same. Some code within NPSWF32.dll keeps calling SetUnhandledExceptionFilter. Over and over and over and over again and over and over and over and over and over again. Internally, this API causes Windows to query the file on disk (for some odd reason).
I fired up IDA Pro and ran it through some light debugging to confirm the problem. While I passed on performing an in-depth technical analysis, I looked at enough to tie the affected code to a ‘crash logging’ feature that’s enabled, out of the box, for debug builds of Flash. To disable this feature – and work around the bug – simply create a mms.cfg text file in the C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash folder (Syswow64 for 64-bit users) with the line CrashLogEnable=0. Restart your browser (or application housing Flash) and you’re done. If only Bugs=0 would work…
You can vote on/watch the reported bug by accessing Adobe’s bug tracker (free sign up required). Update: Adobe confirmed the bug at 12/29/09 04:24 AM and has since made the bug private.
A Beta Application logging something? I am thouroughly shocked by this [/sarcasm]
That explains why my laptop decided to choke so badly on youtube after i installed it, i just assumed that it was one of the reasons that it’s still in beta.
There are separate beta versions of Flash?
WTF are the normal versions then?
:-)
I had just installed 10.1 beta 2 and there were two different builds, a normal build and a debug build. Is it only the debug build that does the logging or is it all releases?
As you said “for debug builds of Flash”. So the question is, if they don’t want the debugging, why install the debugging version? I would guess the other build is actually for those who just want the new coolness of 10.1 (video acceleration being the main reason I got it).
Flash 10 keeps crashing my Chrome browser and I would like to know how to stop it from doing that. I’m not a tech and don’t understand most of the above chat, and would just like a simple answer–like Uninstall Flash or get a different version of Flash or something a “normal” person can understand. Please help! Thanks, G
nice post. quite useful.
This is why I use Flash for YouTube and nothing else. If a site is Flash-heavy I tend to avoid it and I always close YouTube tabs immediately after viewing. I like not worrying if I’ve left my browser running too long, tyvm Adobe.
Sysinternals ftw.
To the guy who suggested turning *on* the windows aero settings…thank you! This fixed the problem right away on my system.
Win7 64-bit
AMD Althon XP dual-core
ATI HD 3200
2 gigs ram