Adobe Flash Player 19.0.0.185 was released on Monday. The program has a bug in it that means the previous version of the Flash Player does not seem to be uninstalled with the installation of the new version on Windows. From the Control Panel, Programs and Features, you can see both versions sitting right next to each other.
A thread on Adobe’s forums brought the issue to the company’s attention that version 18 was experiencing this problem. A bug was filed along with the thread in Adobe’s Bugbase. The bug was closed because the problem was resolved in version 18. However, version 19 was released without the bug being address, so I recorded a new bug to track its progress.
Given the nature of Adobe Flash Player, it is actually uninstalling the old versions and replacing it with the new files. It’s just leaving the remnants behind to make it look like it has not been uninstalled. See the plugin version of Flash Player is completely version 19 now. Internet Explorer and Edge will have their version updated as soon as I run Windows Updates on this computer.
In order to clean up the duplicates, you can perform an uninstall of Flash Player 18 through Control Panel and it will just remove the entry.
Beyond that, you can track down the uninstall entry for the old version of Flash Player in the Registry.
32-bit Windows: HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstall
64-bit Windows: HKLMSoftwareWow6432NodeMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstall
Look through the entries to find the Adobe Flash Player 18 NPAPI key. Here, it was {A580818A-6519-4120-AB1C-F4F6FCFAA7D0} while version 19 was two entries below it.
By deleting the {A580818A-6519-4120-AB1C-F4F6FCFAA7D0} key and refreshing the Control Panel, Programs and Features listing, you will see the old version removed.
It will be interesting to see if Adobe’s updated Flash Player to address this bug will be able to clean up the old versions or will just prevent it from happening with the next update. Given the update chain, I believe it should clean up the old entries and since the manual uninstall is succeeding, I would not anticipate the issue increasing problematically.