Start menu redirection causes Flash player to fail

[chriscubed]

Hello all,

 

We rolled out a year group of student laptops with Windows 7 x64 just before summer, and have come back in September to find that Flash player isn't working on them. I ought to note here that the policies are almost the same as what we were happily using for Windows XP.

 

Under our standard setup, when a flash based web page is opened, the user gets a User Account Control box pop up asking "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?" - asking for administrator credentials before it will install it. Even if you type in the credentials, the page loads with a red X where the flash control should be. I've updated flash to the latest version but it makes no difference.

 

So I decided to narrow down which of our group policies is causing the issue, and it turns out it depends entirely on whether the start menu folder is redirected - I was a little suprised! Originally we had a custom adm file to enable redirection to a mapped network drive, but since then I've tried the UNC path in the standard method and even redirecting to a local folder, but whatever I choose this breaks flash player. As soon as you turn off start menu redirection, flash objects load with no interruption.

 

Has anyone else had this or a similar experience? I'm not sure what I'm going to do as different computers need different start menus so I can't really put it in the mandatory profile we use.