Uninstall ALL things Flash.
I've been having a recurring problem the past few days and I believe I've narrowed the problem down to Adobe Flash... although I am surprised at the level of glitches it's placed on my whole computer.
Anyway, what happens is whatever window I'm working on will suddenly freeze. I'll get various errors in other open windows such as random "file not accessible" messages, icons will go invisible (including the "Start" in the Start menu), programs will error when trying to even load up if at all (sometimes clicking on program icons causes literally nothing to happen), the 'pinned' programs in my Start menu will vanish, the Task Manager will fail to open (giving me an error message), the system will refuse to Shut down (saying I "do not have authorization to shut down") and will revert to the classic "Shut down window" look where the options are in a drop-down menu, and other programs that use the internet to connect will suddenly lose their connection.
The past few days I was stumped as to what was happening, but today it happened whilst browsing in Firefox, where all Flash plugins crashed and the various errors began. At first I thought maybe my video card was acting up. But to my surprise, closing Firefox actually remedied everything. I then tried to do it again using Google Chrome. Within a minute or two, the Flash plugin again crashed and the problems recurred. Only this time, closing Chrome did not remedy it and I had to restart my PC.
I'm currently trying to get it to happen again to test whether or not the problem is with Flash or with my web browsers, but it has not happened yet. Any help in this matter would be ridiculously appreciated. Anytime my computer starts to error randomly and beyond my control causes me to panic due to previous bad experiences. Thanks very much.
I am running Windows XP SP3
Dell XPS 410
Adobe Flash v.11.3.300.262

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