I've had this for a while, some of the Flash content on the BBC website wouldn't play (although this is better than the problems I had with their previous Real Player content which always seemed to kill my wireless router). I was told my version of Flash wasn't up to date. Re-installing Flash didn't make any difference and following the suggestions here didn't help either.
So I decided to have a closer inspection. I had a hunch it may have something to do with my user agent string, since Flash content worked in some places (including the BBC iPlayer, go figure). So I checked my user agent using the following HTML page
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>Untitled Page</title> </head> <body onload="javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)"> </body> </html>
Weirdly this showed my browser as IE6... Which was odd. Searching a bit further I came across this Microsoft article on user agent strings. BTW, the suggestion to type javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent) into the address bar didn't work for me, my guess is this was a security hole waiting for an exploit so has been disabled. Anyway I had a look in my registry to see what was happening and it turned out I had a registry key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform. Part of it pointed to bsalsa.com. I guess I must have installed some of their stuff some time ago though lord knows why they need to fiddle with user agent strings.
Anyway, after deleting this registry key and a restart of IE my user agent string returned to something more sensible and BBC Flash content suddenly sprang into life. Not only that but I can now login into my Fidelity account as well, although that's not necessarily such a good thing given the current state of the stock market.
Update - Hmm, the registry entry has re-appeared, so one of the apps I use quite regularly is writing to that spot in the registry. Next step is to figure out which app it is...
Update 2 - Looks like PHPEdit was responsible, an app written in Delphi which presumably uses one of the components that come from bsalsa.com. I guess any programs using the component may cause the same problem. Getting the latest build from their website fixed the problem.
Thanks for this. This was exactly my problem and had been frustrating me for weeks.
ReplyDeleteI dont even know what the bsala stuff was, but I had 2 entries in my registry.
All working now ... just in time to watch the tennis on BBC :)