Have you ever noticed that some flash media is faster than others? Many people don’t know that there are many formatting options that the standard format application may not make available to the end user. One of the more important factors in formatting flash media is the cluster size, or “Allocation Unit Size” as shown in the Windows 7 format GUI. I tried switching that around a few different ways and acquired some very interesting results! Make your jumpdrive/flashdrive faster.

After some research I’ve found that the word on the net is 4096 is the best option for most drives. Give it a try and see if it improves your drive speeds. Comment below if you found this article useful!

So I noticed a few days ago that Skype would not launch. When I tried, the loading cursorwould show for just a second and then… Nothing. I fired up TaskMgr to get a good reading on Memory Usage and the such and noticed that as soon as I fired up Skype it would pretty much load for a few seconds and then close. Naturally, I fire up the Event Viewer to see if Skype is logging anything useful during the crash.

Sure enough, Skype is throwing some access violation faults. Now I don’t know about you guys, but the majority of the time when an application complains about access violations it’s normally 1 of 3 things… Your RAM is having issues, you have a rootkit, or filesystem infection of some sort. Of course hundreds of other reasons exist, these just happen to be the most common in my experience. So I attempted to fire up Kaspersky’s Rootkit Removal tool [TDSSKiller], but it failed with the same access violation.

At that point I knew something was seriously wrong and grabbed my entire Virus Combat Kit. Which is basically composed of GMER, ComboFix, TDSSKiller, and an updated installer for NOD32 to install once the machine has been cleaned. To make a long story short GMER lead me to discovering that AirfoilInject3.dll was being injected into all of my apps to hijack audio. However, I had uninstalled the bonjour service earlier in the week, crippling AirFoil because it depended on that service. Essentially, AirFoil was injecting apps with its crippled system and causing issues in many other apps. If you had read my post about Flash being broken in Google Chrome, you would know it took me quite sometime to trace this as the root cause. The simple fix is to uninstall AirFoil. There are several applications which “hook” into various Windows Features. If these special apps crash or fail to hook properly, they can cause serious instability issues with the system.

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.

For all those interested, this entire post is nothing more than the ramblings of a working man…

First, let’s start with those tiny straws and stirrers that every company office with a coffee pot has.