I need help dfiagnosing shock wave player

Good morning everyone. I just developed a problem this morning whereby Youtube nor any video will playback. I ran the Adobe Flash player check and it said I need a plugin (shockwave) to play video. I believe I have had this all along so i dont know why it said that. I uninstalled both flash players (FF&IE) and reinstalled but i get the same error message.

Can anyone help me diagnose what is wrong here?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Hi Metalman,
They could be installed, BUT they need to be set to Allways activate, (in FF, not sure about IE).
open plugin manager reset to allways activate.

Roy

I appreciate all the responses, but i am currently overwhelmed with choices all the people want me to do.

I feel the best way to proceed is to check my add on thru the tools and found "silverlite" need always needed permission, so i changed that to always on with this not helping.

Then i uninstalled flash with the uninstaller too and followed Callender's instructions and this also did not work.

It still says i need the shockwave player installed which is already installed as it continually gives me a dialog box saying it has stopped working , so it is installed on my PC.

I need to go down a list of most probable to least probable issues why this is happening.

I dont want to run FF in some other fashion, band-aided or without flash, since it worked fine yesterday, why does it not work today?

Just as fast as this problem developed, it has corrected itself!

Thanks for all the input from everyone it will be useful if the problem reoccurs, at least I know where to start my diagnosis.