Why is "flashplayerplugin" appearing in my command line output?

After opening the cmd.exe as usual, I suddenly see a weird thing: every output of any command that I enter that is related to my dev environment (ruby, git) in the cmd window is prefixed with the text: flashplayerplugin.

Interestingly, regular windows commands such as ver, dir work normally.

I uninstalled any flash plugins I had and restarted Windows, I also ran CCleaner cleaning any garbage I had and fixing registry entries. Didn't help.

See screenshot here:

enter image description here

Any idea what's going on and how to fix it?

My setup: Windows 7 on laptop.
My dev environment: RailsInstaller (Ruby 1.93, Rails 3.2), Git 1.7, RubyMine

MikeMarsian

Posted 2013-03-17T08:25:42.083

Reputation: 191

1Try and enter the command set to list all the environment variables. Does the problem occur with Powershell? – Pincopallino – 2013-03-17T09:36:42.100

SET works fine, no hint of any unusual params here. Powershell works fine as well – MikeMarsian – 2013-03-17T10:26:11.667

Have you tried an sfc /scannow for checking the system files? – Pincopallino – 2013-03-17T11:07:59.687

Ran sfc /scannow - no errors were found – MikeMarsian – 2013-03-17T14:44:16.930

Any chance you're using chocolatey? One thing I did today (which may be totally unrelated) is do a cinst mongodb – Josh Kodroff – 2013-03-20T23:11:18.343

I think this fixed the issue (it's a problem with Airfoil): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15467295/cannot-launch-sdk-manageer

– Josh Kodroff – 2013-03-26T15:02:29.013

Answers

After burning almost a day on this I eventually found a solution:

Using PowerGrep (grep for Windows) I found that I had 2 installations of Flash plugin player: 32 bit version (which I of course removed), and 64 bit version, of which I had no idea. Uninstalling the 64bit version and restarting the system fixed the issue.

MikeMarsian

Posted 2013-03-17T08:25:42.083

Reputation: 191

I've uninstalled the Flash player that installed yesterday, guessing that's the 64-bit version. Where did you find the 32-bit version and how did you remove it? Just deleted a folder? I don't see an entry in Programs for it. – Tom – 2013-03-19T13:16:37.143

I used Power Grep to search for flashplayerplugin string in files - that's how I found it (don't remember the exact location, but I remember it was under Macromedia folder).

Regarding the uninstall, it had uninstall executable in the same place where the flash was located. – MikeMarsian – 2013-03-19T13:23:06.453

The problem for me was a registry key added by AirFoil. Following the solution here worked: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15467295/java-sdk-manager-crashes-with-flashplayerplugin-in-the-input

Josh Kodroff

Posted 2013-03-17T08:25:42.083

Reputation: 87

Excellent note! – sshow – 2015-04-03T06:40:58.853

I hate to leave this dead end for anyone else who comes to this question, but Mike Marsian's solution didn't work for me and I wound up using a System Restore to get me back to yesterday morning (and for once System Restore worked). I think my problem might have been that Chrome has its own copy of Flash. I actually discovered the problem wasn't unique to me via a conversation on Twitter with SourceTree if that provides any leads for people.

For anyone who winds up here, there's a similar Stack Overflow thread.

Tom

Posted 2013-03-17T08:25:42.083

Reputation: 627