[SWFObject] Flash causing IE7 to crash

[Michiel Nijdam]

Hi Geoff,

I've done some more investigation on the IE7 crashes. Brion Mills
reported that requiring a Flash player higher than 6, solved the problem
for him. I also had specified '6' as the needed player in the pages that
crashed. Changing this to '7' resulted in the alternative content being
displayed. It turned out this fresh XP install with IE7 had Flash player
6 installed. So I upgraded to 9. This fixed the crashes on all pages,
whether they had 6 or higher specified as the needed player.

My conclusion: SWFobject, combined with Flash player 6 on Internet
Explorer 7 on XP results in consistent crashes.

Just to be complete, I answered the list of diagnostic questions you
had:

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Here's some questions that Adobe would ask if we reported this to them:

1) What version of the Flash player do you have installed, and if you  
install a different version does it still crash?

I had version 6 installed. Upgrading to 9 solved the crashes.

2) Does it crash consistently? (can you recreate the crash whenever  
you want, or is it random?)

It crashed consistently, but never on initial load. Only after either
reloading or following a hyperlink to a page with the same flash
content, the browser would crash.

3) Does it only crash on a specific page, or every page with Flash  
content?

The crashes appear to occur only on pages where Flash player 6 is
specified in the SWFobject snippet like so:
var dplan = new SWFObject("elements/deztaplan.swf", "deztaplan", "169",
"170", "6", "#FFFFFF");

4) Does it crash if the Flash content is embedded with 'normal' object 
+embed tags, or only when using Javascript like SWFObject or UFO?  
(you can use my test pages or other Flash sites to see of those crash  
the browser as well).

Normal embedding did not result in crashes, the same content embedded
with SWFobject did result in crashes. I haven't tested any other
methods.