Using Settings.sol to set Adobe Flash Settings

Posted on March 21st, 2010

When using Adobe Flash to access old content that was coded on previous versions, a message can appear stating that Flash has stopped a potentially unsafe operation. This message could also appear for content running from network shares. The message will be similar to:

If you select the ’settings’ options the web based Adobe Global Setting panel appears. This actually connects via the internet to a macromedia.com site.

It seems strange that you must connect to an external web site to change settings for a locally installed version of flash – hopefully Adobe will remove this nonsense in the future and release an adm template or something instead. Anyway, each client can set options within this Global Security Settings screen. In this can either the “always allow” option can be selected or a location can be added to the trust list.

Select to Edit Locations | Add location and paste in the value prompted by the gui as this is what was just denied. Or add any other location you want to trust:

Close this web site, relaunch the content and it should now work as expected and display the content without the pop-up warning message.

However, in a situation where multiple clients need to run this content it is inconvenient to ask the users to set this themselves or manually set it on thousands of desktops.

Instead the settings.sol file can be used.

Any of the settings chosen from the web page GUI will be set in the following file (for a WinXP profile)

%userprofile%\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys\settings.sol

So to resolve for everyone do the following:

Logon as one user
Set the relevant options in the web based GUI
Copy the settings.sol file to a central location
Set a logon scripts to copy this file into each users profile at logon

job done.

Tags: adobe, adobe flash player, always allow, flash, global security settings, potentially unsafe operation, settings manager, settings.sol, trust
Filed under Applications, Scripts/Reg | No Comments »

.NET Applications – Assembly cache

Posted on December 12th, 2008

During troubleshooting of an application I have discovered the following information.

Application: Interlink Service Control Manager v1.3.0.36 (SC_Manager)

Problem: After launching the app, you enter credentials and then the app closes.

Troubleshooting: Regmon / filemon / procmon show nothing unusual. The same happens as an admin. The Eventvwr has the following entry:

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    .NET Runtime
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    1023
Description:
.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.1433 – Fatal Execution Engine Error (79FFEE24) (80131506)

Researching this error gives the following Microsoft knowledge base article – KB913384. Installing the recommended hotfix did not resolve the problem in this case.

.NET applications seem to cache stuff to the following location:

C:\WINDOWS\assembly\NativeImages_v2.0.50727_32

FYI – The only way to get to this folder it Start | Run and paste this in. Browsing in My Computer doesn’t show this, even when you are showing all files inluding protected ones.

There are a bunch of folders here corresponding to the cached components. In my case the mscorlib file was getting cached so I remove the cached file from this location:

C:\WINDOWS\assembly\NativeImages_v2.0.50727_32\mscorlib\32e6f703c114f3a971cbe706586e3655\mscorlib.ni.dll

Relaunching the app now worked fine.

I still have no idea why this happenned on multiple servers. There didn’t appear to be any hotfixes installed or changes to the system in between it working and then not working. If I find an answer i’ll post it here.

If anyone has more information as to how .NET apps use this caching location please post the links below.

Tags: .NET, assembly, framework, interlink, nativeimages
Filed under Applications | No Comments »