Solving the ‘cannot find flash.ocx’ problem

Some people are being plagued by PC error messages saying “cannot find flash.ocx”. Often there is no indication of the program that has been looking for the missing file, so diagnosis is difficult.

Flash is an application that is great for providing interactive features on web pages. It is also used by screensavers and to provide menus on CD-ROMS.  It was created by Macromedia (now Adobe) and for the first six generations the main programme file was called flash.ocx but since then the file name has included the vesion number. Some out of date  applications that use Flash expect the file to be called flash.ocx, so throw up this error.

There are two possible solutions to the problem:

  1. Find the application that is causing the problem and update or uninstall it
  2. Create a new version of flash.ocx by finding the latest version of flash on your PC, copying and pasting it into the same directory and renaming the copy to flash.ocx. The file is located in this folder:  C:/WINDOWS/system32/Macromed/Flash

The second solution may be less work but flash.ocx is deleted by the updater every time a new version of Flash comes out.  Consequently you will need to keep repeat the copying and renaming process.