In an embarrassing disclosure, Adobe this week acknowledged that the latest release of its Flash Player, versions 10.3, doesn’t work properly with Internet Explorer 9 on some systems.
The bug is detailed here. The symptoms are that Flash content either doesn’t play or plays in the wrong location, typically in the top left. It might be related to your graphics adapter.:
The reports for Flash Player 10.3 indicate that systems with Intel HD Graphics adapters running Internet Explorer 9 are the systems being impacted by this particular bug. However, if you are encountering this issue and have a different configuration we’d love to hear from you. Please review the instructions on this page for details on generating the information we’ll need for further investigation.
I have seen similar symptoms on systems with high-end ATI graphics adapters, typically when a very large number of tabs are open. I’ve found in that case that killing the right process returns things to normal.
If you’re afflicted by this bug, you have a few options:
- Try updating your Intel HD Graphics drivers, using the latest version from Intel.
- Temporarily switch to another default browser.
- Disable hardware graphics acceleration and use software rendering instead, using these instructions.
I don’t recommend rolling back to an earlier Flash version. There are too many security issues in Flash 10.2.
Have you been affected by this one?
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
I noticed this issue pretty quickly after updating, I think the fourth option in your list of options should be “disable flash”.
i’ll never be impacted by that bug because i’ll never install any version of flash.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/adobe-tops-kaspersky-labs-list-for-top-ten-pc-vulnerabilities/49093
Thank you for this post. I was affected by this issue. Upgrading my Intel HD Graphics driver seems to have fixed the issue. I’ll let you know if the issue pops up again.
I’ve this issue in my laptop running win7, IE9 on ATI radeon graphics.
IIf I absolutely must use a site that requires Flash, I open up Google Chrome just for that one site.
Normally, I use IE9 with all add-ons disabled, and with ActiveX prompting turned off as well (otherwise every other site prompts me to install Flash). One exception: Silverlight, but that’s because it gets updated through Windows Update and isn’t annoying.
Yes, this is affecting me on my recently purchased HP Pavilion G6 laptop. It does have the Intel HD graphics. I thought that maybe it was just IE 9 that was rendering stuff wrong, but after looking closer, it was indeed Flash that was messing up. This problem actually stopped me from updating Flash on another PC I had in case it got that problem too (but it does have a different graphics card). I disabled the hardware acceleration for now. HP doesn’t have a newer version of the Intel HD graphics driver for download yet, and I’m reluctant download Intel’s latest version because HP might have tweaked the hardware.
this update actually fixed all my performance issues with adobe flash player in ie9…
I noticed it all through beta and still now. I’ve got one machine that Flash will crash I.E. 9 a lot. Flash is a bad joke that hopefully will go away soon with HTML 5.
Oops, I guess I should have said that Flash is failing on a machine with ATI graphics.
?? If you set it for hardware acceleration and your drivers aren’t working, it won’t display correctly. We’ll try to make it more graceful, but it’s hardly embarrassing.
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/05/reported-issues-with-flash-player-10-3-and-internet-explorer-9.html
jd/adobe
John, thanks for your comment. I used the word “embarrassing” because that was the sense I got from the original announcement, which included a rather sheepish apology.
As a commenter on that post noted, “This update should have been tested better. Quality product and service means the end user should NEVER have to worry about ‘workarounds’.”