Flash player is primarily used in the development of interactive websites. Programmers embed it in web pages using Active X controls. This, in turn, enables certain functionalities and features in the web pages.

While Flash player is useful, sometimes it becomes necessary to uninstall it. One such situation is when you repeatedly receive ‘flash.ocx is missing error’.

You may too need to uninstall it if you are receiving the error listed above. However, before you proceed with the uninstalling, we recommend you try this workaround, which has helped many users get rid of this persistent error without uninstalling Flash Player.

• Open My Computer
• Go to C:WindowsSystem32MacromedFlash
• Find and select the flash*.ocx file (flash*.ocx represents the version of this file that is installed in your Windows computer. For example, users with Flash 10 will find flash10.ocx is present inside the above folder. Sometimes you find more than one version of flash.ocx file. If so, remove the latest one)
• Rename this file
• Restart Windows
• Check whether the issue is resolved

Those of you who are still receiving the error will need to uninstall the utility. You can do this through Add or Remove Programs.

• Close all open programs
• Open the Control Panel window
• Click Add or Remove Programs
• Choose Flash Player in the list containing the names of  currently installed programs
• Click Uninstall
• Restart Windows

If, for some reasons, you are not able to uninstall Flash Player using the built-in Windows uninstaller, download and use the uninstaller from Adobe to remove Flash Player.

• Open your web browser
• Go to Adobe’s official website
• Locate the Adobe Flash Player uninstaller
• Download it and save the exe file
• Ensure that all running programs are closed (At the least, all programs that use Flash Player must be closed before you run the exe file. Popular programs that use this utility include instant messengers and web browsers)
• Launch the uninstaller by double-clicking its exe file
• Click Yes to allow the application to uninstall Flash Player
• Restart Windows after the uninstaller has successfully uninstalled Flash Player

After you’ve successfully uninstalled the utility, you can then download and install its’ most recent version. But before you do this, we recommend you run a registry scan. This will ensure that all entries related to the previous version of Flash Player have been permanently deleted from the registry. For registry scans and other registry maintenance tasks, you should use a trusted registry cleaner.