How many times, the old Ronco TV spokesperson used to ask, has this happened to you? You're playing a Flash video in Firefox for Windows, and for a moment, you think it's actually going to start up.

You see the first two seconds of video, and you may even hear a little sound. And then nothing. You know the control still works because you see it's still pre-loading and caching content, but it just won't play.

BetaNews has noticed Flash's tendency to adopt this bizarre state for over two years; and with the latest refresh to Flash Player 10, we noticed it again. The cause, experts have said, is a set of System Registry settings that aren't in sync with one another, but what it is that got them "out of sync" is a mystery. And despite countless suggestions, we've discovered that few Registry tweaks seem to work for longer than the duration of the session; once we reboot, we're in trouble again.

If you find yourself in the same boat, then our recommendation for now is to use this uninstallation utility from Adobe, which is a command line tool that works specifically for Flash. This was released for other purposes, but we often find it necessary to uninstall and re-install Flash, and this seems to be the fastest way to go about it for now. Use the utility as directed, uninstall Flash, and then go back and reinstall it again.

This should result in a fully-working Flash, at least for the time being. We've seen some other suggestions, including this from Ars Technica which actually involves the use of the game music composition app Garage Band. Since that game does indeed use Flash, the fact that the game did lead to a solution for one user suggests that it's capable of tweaking that mystery set of Registry entries.