A few of my customers, lately, are complaining that they can’t watch videos at YouTube.com. They see a message stating that the latest version of the Flash player isn’t installed or that they may be experiencing issues with the current version or configuration of the Java software.

I’ve seen references to this problem, elsewhere, but no real solutions.

When you check to see if you have the latest version of Flash Player installed (flash.com), you see the “movie” and it it’s confirmed that you already have the latest Flash Player installed. Hmmm…now what?

The next step is to try to download the latest version of Java (sun.com), but when you try to download the file, you receive an error message stating that your “security settings have prevented you from downloading this file”.

You think you’re being sneaky by trying to download Firefox (firefox.com) to see if you can view the videos with that browser, instead. You get the same error message stating that the file you’re trying to download has been blocked by your security settings.

You’re getting pretty frustrated, by now, and there is no reference to which “security settings” are blocking these files.

Try this:
Open Internet Explorer. Click Tools, then Internet Options. Click the Advanced tab. At the bottom of that window you’ll see two buttons – Restore Advanced Setting and Reset. Click each of them and follow the prompts to reset EVERYTHING back to it’s original state. Then close Internet Explorer and restart it. Now, go to YouTube.com and see if you’re able to view the videos. If so, go ahead and download FireFox (firefox.com), just to have as a backup.

Or This:
If the above fix doesn’t seem to help, the next step may be to remove all of the current JRE (JAVA Runtime Environments). Tp do this, just go into the Control Panel, then Add & Remove Programs. Look for the installations of the JAVA Runtime Environments (JREs). There will most likely be three or four of them listed, including updates to each.

Begin uninstalling all of these. Don’t worry, you’re going to reinstall the latest version.

Once you’ve removed all of the JRE instances, you need to go to www.sun.com to download and install the latest version. Once that has been completed, you can go to YouTube and try to view a video.

These fixes will surely not work in all cases, but they do offer help to some.