IE6 wont play local SWF files. Blank white screen only

[jmowrey]

Good afternoon all,

I've recently run into an issue with IE6 playing SWF files. As of now when i try to play a SWF file within IE6 I get nothing but a white screen. If I remove KB943460 the files play correctly....although I dont think the patch is the root of the problem. I do have units with the patch that dont experience the problem. Only some do. Making this very annoying.


My situation is that I have a vendor application that plays local SWF files on our workstations. The vendor app has a local cache of SWF content files that it plays based on triggered events. The application basically acts as an extention of IE when it trys to play the files. So, the application wont play the files and neither will native IE making this a system issue and not a vendor application issue.

The strange part is that IE shows that Shockwave and Flash are installed correctly. I can view flash content on a web page just fine. Adobe's page for testing the plugins also shows both as A-oK. It's only when I try to open a local SWF file that I have the problems.

Thanks to everyone in advance.

 

[RBL6]

Hi jmowrey & all,

Have you found a resolution to this issue?

I am having the same problem: a web page from a web server trying to display local SWF files works on some (one) PC and not on others. For the life of me I can't find the difference between the PCs that work and the PCs that do not. Both have KB943460 installed...

Thanks to anyone who can help!

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

This is complete guess-work from my part... is this possibly a zone setup issue?

I'd go through the configuration for the zones listed under "Tools" -> "Internet Options" -> "Security" and make sure all the settings for those is the same on the PC that doesn't work as the one that does.

I'm pretty sure that one of the settings has something to do with cross-domain scripting or something similar, which could be the issue.

Hope this helps,
Dan



Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

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[jmowrey]

Just wanted to let everyone know that we did find the problem with our SWF playback.

The root of our problem was due to MS patches. We ended up finding a few patches that would at time cause the issue but the root of our problems came from the xpsp3res.dll file. KB943460 did replace/update this file and restoring it back to the pre-patch version would solve our white screens. Problem being that we couldn't continue to run on the older version of the DLL. We found that MS08-010 update the file to a non-bugged version and that fixed us up. MS08-010 has been superceeded by MS08-024 so that is what we deployed to our units that used the vendor application.

To this point we have not had any further issues with any patches that have been applied since MS08-024 was sent out.

 

[RBL6]

Thanks BillyRay for the suggestion. I did go through all the IE settings in the applicable zones as well as in the Advanced tab, set everythign the same, and still one PC worked and one did not.

Also thanks jmowrey for the update on your fix.

Posting our fix for others: My issue turned out to be a setting in the Flash Player's Global Security Settings panel (right-click a Flash object -> Settings -> Advanced -> Global Security Settings). I had set to trust content on C:. This appears to also trust content on my Y: drive. Removing that setting caused white screens; adding it makes the content appear. This setting appears to be stored in the file C:\Documents and Settings\userid\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys\settings.sol. We may choose not to deploy a managed update to this file (appears to be no public API/file format for it, not sure we want to manage this file from now until forever) so we may use IFRAMEs on the external web page and load a stub HTML page that is in the same folder as the SWF files, and have that draw the <OBJECT> tag to load the SWF - seems to work as workaround.