How to Disable the Macromedia Flash Player on Presentation Servers

Summary

This article describes how to disable the Macromedia Flash Player on Presentation servers.

Background

One of the most problematic issues associated with using a published Internet Explorer on a MetaFrame server is the Macromedia Flash Player. The Macromedia Flash Player uses lot of bandwidth, and it can impact the quality of the ICA communication on slow connections.

Platform:

Windows 2000/2003
Metaframe XP, Metaframe Presentation Server 3.0, Citrix Presentation Server 4.0

Procedure

The problem here is that Macromedia Flash Player versions 7 and 8 use the non-standard type REG_SZ instead of REG_DWORD for the value of: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000}\Compatibility Flags.

The following procedure disables the Macromedia Flash Player in such a way that the user is not be prompted for a download. The procedure does not remove the Macromedia Flash Player, but disables it completely.

You must create an ActiveX compatibility registry key for the Macromedia Flash Player.

Create the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000}

Create a DWORD value called “Compatibility Flags”. Set its value to 0x00000400 (1024 in decimal).

Note: There is no HKEY_CURRENT_USER equivalent setting, so making the change described above affects all users on the server.

More information

Refer to How to stop an ActiveX control from running in Internet Explorer.