I have been trying to get the flash player to work. I have uninstalled and
reinstalled. It was working okay until I downloaded the upgrade. There were
only a few sites that did not work. Now none of them do. I tried everything
on the help desk. My registry is blank, so I didn't dare to do the registry
fix download. I am pretty sure I have XP home. Any ideas?

I was having the exact same problems - uninstalled/installed Flash and
Shockwave. Used the appropriate uninstaller, searched for rogue .dll extension
files, cleaned out the C:\Windows\System32\Macromedia\Flash files, looked at
the manage add-ons, posted on this forum, e-mailed Adobe, spoke with them on
the phone and even uninstalled IE7 and went back to IE 6. None of that helped.

Reading through some of the responses on various posts, I found the following:

Uninstall flash with the latest Adobe stand alone uninstaller

Download Complete Standalone installer Flash Player 9 earlier version from
http://www.softwarepatch.com/internet/flash.html

Uninstall shockwave with the latest Adobe stand alone uninstaller

Download Stand-alone installers for Shockwave Player: previous versions only
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_18629

Note: Users of Windows XP operating system must use the 8.5.1 Shockwave player
or higher. For more information, please seeInstalling the Shockwave Player on
Microsoft Windows XP (TechNote tn_15924).
Windows Shockwave Player 9.0.0.434

I tried this last night - one and then the other one - and they both are
running fine.

Hope this helps someone else.