Blocking Adobe Flash Player Automatic Updates With Group Policy.

In a previous post, I discussed deploying Adobe Flash Player in an enterprise environment. I also mentioned that in order to disable the automatic update feature of Flash, you should create an MST transform file to install a custom mms.cfg.

This is all well and good, unless you are intending on installing the EXE version of Flash, and not the MSI.

Usually, I’d go MSI over EXE any day of the week, but Flash Player is a fickle b*tch of an install. For some reason, I was seeing plenty of MSI installations fail while using SCCM 2007. Most of the failures related to certain files not being marked for installation. The following event log entry could be observed on the machines.

Product: Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX — Error 1722.There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action NewCustomAction1, location: C:\DOCUME~1\<username>\LOCALS~1\Temp\InstallAX.exe, command: -install activex -msi

For this reason, I bailed out and went with the EXE installation, which so far, when used with the new silent install switch (-install) works flawlessly.

Now, obviously we can’t transform an EXE, so I’ve had to come up with the following CMD script which can be applied to computer startup through the use of a Group Policy Object.

ECHO AutoUpdateDisable=1 > %WinDir%\System32\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg
ECHO DisableProductDownload=1 >> %WinDir%\System32\Macromed\Flash\mms.cfg

The nice thing about this script is that it will only run if the Macromed folder exists.