Flash keeps crashing on ALL browsers and uses 50% CPU

ok now i know that most of you hate me (especially confoosious).. but if anyone can shed some light on this i would TOTALLY appreciate it. im on vacation with some relatives right now and i need to watch a movie for my business management class... i really sholudnt have gone on vacation because i actually have a lot of school work to do...

anyway i recently upgraded to windows 7 (though i dont think the OS is the problem); and my computer always freezes when i watch a video through my browsers.

firefox, chrome, IE7,8,9; they all freeze when i play a video online. so i open the task manager to check whats up and noticed that when i play a video, the browser, and that firefox plugin uses 50% of the CPU.

ive tried reinstalling but that didnt work.. however, i can play videos using other programs (non browser related).

also for some reason, i can play videos perfectly fine on all of the browsers on safe mode. that prompted me to install adobe flash in safe mode, but the problem still occurs when i boot the OS normally.

im out of ideas now so.. help?

thanks bro

*there are lots of IT people here. you guys must know about flash right? right.

For starters I'd download and run CCleaner just to clean up a computer, especially if you've never performed much maintenance in the past.

I doubt it's malware or virus related, so you don't need to really get into scans right now.

I'd make sure everything was updated - browser, Flash, Windows, etc. Make sure you've got all the proper drivers installed since you just updated the OS as well.

If you've got add-ons running, disable them and see if that has any effect.

That's the basic stuff off the top; I'm sure other people will have other suggestions.

[quote name='Strell']For starters I'd download and run CCleaner just to clean up a computer, especially if you've never performed much maintenance in the past.

I doubt it's malware or virus related, so you don't need to really get into scans right now.

I'd make sure everything was updated - browser, Flash, Windows, etc. Make sure you've got all the proper drivers installed since you just updated the OS as well.

If you've got add-ons running, disable them and see if that has any effect.

That's the basic stuff off the top; I'm sure other people will have other suggestions.[/QUOTE]

thanks for the input, but it didnt work. however, i found out what the problem is (though i cant find a solution for it)

it turns out that it is my soundcard thats causing the problems.

When i disable my audio driver through device manager, youtube runs fine. all videos run normally.

what i do notice though, is that when i turn on the volume, i hear distortions and static bursts. so i kind of think that the computer is struggling to get the sounds through the speakers.

my audio is SB Audigy SE or LS (SE and LS interchangeable i think), and went to the manufacturers website to download the driver for it. well, windows 7 download drivers automatically for you, so i uninstalled the driver and installed it manually. still the problem persists though.

as of now, i dont know how to deal with this... completely ran out of ideas. its definitely not flash, but its the sound card.. i dont know what the problem is though, because when i had XP, everything was fine. the problem began to arise after i installed Windows 7. now i cant watch ANY video at all via my browsers..

maybe my sound card is not supported by windows 7? but if its not, there shouldnt be a driver for it..