Joaneee said:
I did all that stuff too, repeatedly. Followed all troubleshooting
instructions from Adobe - finally, tried running IE as administrator
BEFORE
going to web site that uses Flash. Voila! Flash works. Try it!
(Ironically, UAC refers to iexplore.exe as an unknown program from an
unidentified publisher when I start it using Run as Administrator...)
Strangely, my other Vista computer (an HP laptop) does not have this
problem
- runs Flash stuff whenever. The troublesome computer is a Dell desktop.
This doesn't answer the original question about Flash, but...
My first reaction was that the "unknown publisher" warning was Dell's fault
resulting from its delivery of a Dell-customized IE configuration but taking
a look at an SP1 installation I see that the copy of IE doesn't claim to be
signed, and trying to run it as admiistrator gets the "unknown publisher"
flag -- what's going on?
Turns out that one of the less-publicized corners of the UAC process seems
to be getting a little more paranoid than usual. To demonstrate this, take
this same IEXPLORE.EXE file for which UAC says "unknown publisher" and COPY
(DO NOT MOVE!) it to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32. Now right-click it and click "run
as administrator" and it will say "Microsoft Windows" instead of "unknown
publisher". The UAC code considers %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32 to be a trusted
folder, but not %PROGRAMFILES%\Internet Explorer, so in its usual folder the
fact that IEXPLORE.EXE is signed isn't considered worthy of notice by UAC.
Note also that the properties page for IEXPLORE.EXE (and numerous other
Vista files) don't show a tab named "Digital Signatures". The file is
signed, but to show that a digital signature exists you need to use a tool
such as Sysinternals' "SigCheck" utility.
BTW: I can't guarantee that there won't be undesirable side effects from
running IE out of %WINDIR%\SYTEM32, so (you did COPY and not MOVE, right?)
delete the copy of IEXPLORE.EXE from \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32.
Joe Morris
