The recent proliferation of Macromedia Flash ads disturbs me to no end so I started looking for a way to disable Flash permanently in IE. From browsing old newsgroup posts in Deja, it appears that this issue has been around for some time.

• Simply uninstalling the plug-in (via regsvr32 /u) is pointless as the next time IE accesses a Flash-enabled page, it will prompt you to (re)install Flash.
• Redirecting www.macromedia.com in the TCP/IP hosts file does nothing.
• As far as I can tell, tweaking the security settings (at least in IE 5.5) simply leads to error messageboxes about how ActiveX controls are disabled so "the page may not display correctly."

Oy!

Happily, a solution came to me from reading the Macromedia web documentation. Note that after making the following modification, you may notice that Flash-enabled pages (Yahoo mail, for example) load a tad bit slower at times. WHATEVER. The change is easily reversed if you want your precious Flash back... :-p

If you are running NT or Win2000, the Flash OCX files can likely be found in c:\winnt\system32\macromed\flash. Just change the permissions on these files so that nobody has access to them and restart IE if it is running. Haven't tried to disable flash in Win9x yet, but I will test it another time. Amusingly, shortly after hiding swflash.ocx, I was prompted to upgrade to Flash 6 which uses flash.ocx instead (which I quickly disabled in the same manner). Enjoy Flash-less browsing...

[08/15/2002] Incidentally, this doesn't seem to be an issue for Netscape, and in light of the recently revealed SSL bug in Internet Explorer, I have since switched to Navigator 6.2 to do most of my browsing...

[11/01/2002] Just read that renaming the .ocx files works as well.