Adobe Flash Player does not update

A lot of security flaws in the Adobe Flash Player have been posted and a whole new virus category came to live where your computer gets infected by simply visiting a somewhat normal website. So you need to update you OS and your webbrowser AND every common plugin you use.

But what do you do if you cannot update your plugin even if you want to? I tried to update the Flash Player but it did not work. The download manager "getplusplus" did not start to download and even the full download of the player (buried somewhere deep inside the Adobe website) did not work. I even found an (even deeper buried) uninstaller but it did not help. Every time I started the full install or tried to use the download manager the existing installation did not get updated.

Again I found help on a weblog describing how to get rid of the getplusplus plugin in Firefox. It turned out to be an old version of the download manager which could not get updated and did not work with the new version of the flash player either. Strangely enough the new getplusplus gets installed but does not replace the old version and the outcome is a messed up download manager and a Flash Player that won't get updated ever again. So I disabled the getplusplus plugins in Firefox and deleted the file "np_gp.dll" from the plugins folder to end this. After that I could update the getplusplus and afterwards my Flash Player.