Thank you le Pingouin and DG101. I started investigating Gnash and the more I read the more it seemed likely to be unsatisfactory and outside my comfort zone due to my own limited understanding of just so many things! I'm afraid that I came to more or less the same conclusion about VLC and Allplayer. I saw that the absolutely latest version of Flash Player claims to have made an effort to allay my security concerns.
Last night I tried to get round the installation issues I had with Flash Player, and got it to download in FF on my admin a/c. When I had finished it told me "you are now running Flashplayer" so I went to the BBC News site to test it (still on the admin a/c" and it didn't work - I was told that I still didn't have Flash Player, which seemed odd given that Adobe had told me that I was running it only two minutes earlier!
I wondered if I still had some older bits still lurking around so ran Revouninstall which found it straight away and uninstalled it afresh, ensuring that any related bits got the heave too. Back to the BBC News (still on admin) and tried to see a video clip to be told, as expected this time, that I didn't have Flash Player. I followed the BBC's link to install it and it went like clockwork and worked perfectly. So far so good....
I sign out of admin and back to my day-to-day account, open up Firefox and the BBC News but apparently I no longer have Flash Player even though it dutifully appears on this account's program list.
Now you can probably understand why some of the above alternatives to Flash Player are out of my comfort zone! Having installed a functioning version in the admin account which also appears as perfectly installed on the day-to-day account, how do I get the day-to-day a/c's Firefox to recognise it and use it, please?
P.S. Ha! Bl***y computers! In my day-to-day account FF tells me that it has still disabled my Flash Player plugin because it's out of date. Well, it isn't actually. It's just that I installed it via the admin account - "Pay Attention please, FF!"
Last edited by Cameronian; 19th November 2011 at 08:40.