Flash ocx "Class not registered" on Windows 7 x64

Question

I have a WPF app that uses Flash10c.ocx developed on a 32 bit machine. I didn't have to register the ocx on my dev machine, I just installed the latest flash, added a reference and started coding. When testing on a 64 bit system I get ye old "Class not registered" which I think mean I need to regsvr the ocx. Is it Ok to just copy the 32 bit ocx (I'm pretty sure its 32 bit as its located in C:\Windows\System32\Macromed on the dev system) to a 64 bit system and register it?

Update: regsvr32 /i flash10c.ocx errors out with "The module flash10c.ocx las loaded but the call to DllRegisterServer failed with error code 0x80004005"

Update 2: I've given up on this and decided to run Flash on 32 bit systems only. If anyone has a better answer I'd like to hear it but I'm marking the current suggestion as answered to give due credit for the effort.

Answer 1

May be the flash installer is meant to be only for 32 bit OS. Hence it did not install properly on a 64 bit machine. The error means that you will need to manually register the ocx but will it register successfully that's a totally different question.

Edit 1: here is Adobe's statement of support for 64-bit systems (there is none) (I assume you are using 64 bit browser on a 64 bit machine)

Edit 2: Another forum message about Flash on 64-bit Windows.

Answer 2

The reason it's not working for you is that your WPF application is running as 64-bit.

A .NET application is able to run as 32-bit or 64-bit; and the CLR is JITing your app to whatever architecture the application is running on - in this case 64-bit.

Except you now want your 64-bit application to load a 32-bit dll. This is not possible. A 64-bit process can only load 64-bit dlls. A 32-bit process can only load 32-bit dlls. No amount of fiddling with COM object registration will change this; it's not a question of missing registry entries.

Adobe Flash only comes as a 32-bit dll. Adobe does not now (and hopefully will never) have a 64-bit version.

In order for your WPF .NET application to load the 32-bit flash dll, it needs to be running as 32-bit process. There is a way, in Visual Studio's build configuration, to force your .NET application to only target x86, rather than Any CPU.

The choices of CPU targets are:

• Any CPU
• x86
• x64
• Itanium

Flash, for what it's worth, doesn't have an Itanium version, either.

See StackOverflow: Visual Studio “Any CPU” target for more discussion about target cpus.