Force Exit Flash Player without Restarting your PC

Force Exit Flash Player without Restarting your PC

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Force Exit Flash Player without Restarting your PC

Is your game slowing down and shortly after reloading the issues are back?

Sometimes it is simply time to reboot your computer.

Most of the time, however it's just Flash player that needs to be restarted. One would think that closing their browser window that has the flash game in it would close flash. Unfortunately, most browsers use one flash instance for all their tabs including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. The other problem is that even if you completely close every last tab of your browser sometimes the flash plug-in remains loaded and when you restart your browser you are right back to using the "broken" instance of flash that was giving you problems to being with.

Thus, you have two options left at this point. You can either force flash to completely exit or you can restart your computer. Force exit is much faster than rebooting, so here are the steps to save you time. There are different steps for each browser.

Chrome

Method A

1. Click in the address box.

2. Press SHIFT ESC

3. A "Task Manager - Google Chrome" window will open.

4. Scroll down and find "Plug-in Shockwave Flash" or similar and click to select it.

5. Click "End Process"

6. You will notice that all tabs using flash will report that flash has crashed. Now reload the page you need and flash will start up again.

Method B

1. Click on the wrench icon in the upper right corner of your browser.

2. Select Tools -> Task Manager

3. A "Task Manager - Google Chrome" window will open.

4. Scroll down and find "Plug-in Shockwave Flash" or similar and click to select it.

5. Click "End Process"

6. You will notice that all tabs using flash will report that flash has crashed. Now reload the page you need and flash will start up again.

Internet Explorer [all versions]

Unfortunately there is no browser tool built-in to even the latest IE (IE8) to show processes, so we have to go out to the good old windows task manager to start killing processes.

1. Close all Internet Explorer windows.

2. Launch Windows Task Manager using one of the following.

a. Press CTRL SHIFT ESC

b. Right-click on your Start bar (next to the Start button is a good spot) and select "Task Manager from the list.

c. Press Windows Key R or Click Start->Run.

d. Type "taskmgr" in the run "Open" box and click "OK".

3. Click the Processes tab and select and "End Process" on any iexplore.exe processes you see running.

4. Relaunch IE.

FireFox

Method A

1. Click Tools -> Add Ons.

2. Select the Plugins icon.

3. Scroll down to Shockwave Flash.

4. Click "Disable".

5. Count to 10.

6. Click Enable.

7. Reload your page.

Method B

1. Install Process Explorer from Microsoft.

a. This is a task manager that shows much more information and detail about the processes running on your computer, including what directory a process is located, who it's parent process is, and MUCH more. I am never without it.

2. Launch Process Explorer, look for firefox.exe.

3. Click the symbol in front of firefox, if it is not expanded and right-click "plugin-container.exe" and select "kill process".

4. Reload your web page.

Method C

1. Launch Windows Task Manager using one of the following.

a. Press CTRL SHIFT ESC

b. Right-click on your Start bar (next to the Start button is a good spot) and select "Task Manager from the list.

c. Press Windows Key R or Click Start->Run.

d. Type "taskmgr" in the run "Open" box and click "OK".

2. Click the Processes tab then select and "End Process" on plugin-container.exe.

Opera

Method A