When I open a page that has the following in the html: object
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
then my CPU usage goes to nearly 100% and stays there until I close the page.

The reason I need to open these pages is because the shockwave
objects/controls have audio that I?m listening to (not movies).

Does anyone have any ideas on why or what to configure so that CPU usage stays
normal when opening these pages.

The CPU usage problem starts the minute I open a page -- even before clicking
on the controls that play the audio. The problem goes away the instant I click
the "X" button on the upper right corner of the browser to close the page (both
Firefox 1.5 and IE7).

This is driving me crazy because I need to listen to this audio for its
educational content.

Thanks for any help.

The only thing I can seem to dig up that helped was lowering the frame rate
from 30 to 15. This cut back a bit. There are some other small optimization
tricks that slightly help but none of them seem to be a real solution.

There are a few articles which are out of date stating that flash player uses
100% of the available CPU until it is called on by another application. I did
some tests with applications running and a flash website running in a browser
and as I quit the applications the browser did start to take up more CPU. It
seems like there is some truth in this.

When I download the Flash Player 8 & 9 security.pdf it goes into saying that
Flash player has now created quotas on what the amount of memory and CPU it
will use. So that negated this thought.

So basically I came up with a whole lot of nothing. It is exceptionally hard
to test this stuff and the effect it will have on peoples computers in a live
environment with no documentation or answers to this.

IF ANYONE has an answer to this it would be greatly appreciated.

After upgrading my video drivers, system bios, running endless diagnostics,
virus and spyware checks, my latest update (thanks to someone on the Nvidia
support site) is that the problem turns out to be easy to solve for IE but not
for Firefox.

According to the following article from the Adobe site, Active X needs to be
turned on for flash to work properly in IE.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowled...11#install_win

?4. Security level: Your Internet Explorer security level may be set to High
or a custom level which does not allow viewing of ActiveX controls. ... the
Medium: Default Level will allow you to view Flash content. For any Custom
Level, ensure that both "Download Signed ActiveX controls" and "Run ActiveX
controls and plug-ins" are not disabled. (Enable or Prompt will work)."

So that?s the solution for getting IE to work normally. But unfortunately,
that doesn't solve the problem for Firefox. Firefox doesn?t use ActiveX in the
first place. Whatever the equivalent is for Firefox, it simply doesn?t work ?
at least not on my computer. There may be some other configuration setting
somewhere that makes it work, but if there is one, then I?m at a loss to figure
it out. If I ever find out what it is, then I?ll record it here for others.