Flash broken in Chrome

If you're like me and you wake up one day to an update that completely breaks Flash in Chrome, then you'll be needing a fix that has yet to be provided. In my case, completely uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome did not fix the issue. I was actually running in the Dev channel so I downgraded to Stable, but Flash was still broken and displaying black squares where Flash content was suppose to be.
I also tried the Nightly/Canary build to no avail. After a few weeks of wasted attempts and randomly working Flash, I decided to tamper with the "gcswf32.dll" myself. First I tried reverting the DLL to earlier versions of Flash 10.1+, but that didn't seem to help at all, oddly. Finally, I replaced Chrome's internal Flash with the current Beta DLL and it worked!!

I've made a patch that will fix the broken Flash in Chrome and do all the heavy lifting for you, you can download it on my Software Page. If you should choose to do the process manually, here are the instructions. <--- On hold. :/

Alternate video link


1.) Close Chrome and make sure Chrome isn't a running process.

2.) Uninstall ALL versions of Flash from your PC.

3.) Acquire the 11.2 [Beta] version of "npswf.dll", which is the main Flash DLL. The only sure-fire way of acquiring this DLL in its untouched state, is to install the 32-bit version of Flash 11.2 from this page. Once installed you can either search for this DLL or navigate to "C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash" and you will see "NPSWF32_11_2_202_197.dll". Those last few numbers might be a bit different by the time others try this "fix".
Here is an alternative download link for that file. :)

4.) Replace the Flash DLL that Chrome uses with the 11.2 Beta. On Vista/7 it should be located somewhere around here...
ex; C:\Users\BinaryBrother\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\16.0.912.77\gcswf32.dll
Simply move the Beta DLL to take the place of the one Chrome is currently using.

5.) Fire up Chrome and enjoy working Flash. :)


This fix should cause Flash in Chrome to, once again, begin functioning normally. This fix will ONLY fix broken Flash in Chrome and has not been extensively tested. Please comment below if this has helped you.

Update [2/10/2012]
Updated to the latest version of Chrome [17.0.963.46] and it broke Flash again. I simply did the workaround again and it fixed my Flash.

Update [2/12/2012]
Found the root cause and repaired the issue. Read my latest post for more info. :)