And now, for some Good News.....

The above is a collage of some of last year's spring flowers from around our grounds, just to brighten up a dull week around here.

The good news is: I've solved the problem of getting a version of Shockwave Player working in Windows 7. And if you think it was simply a matter of downloading the latest version from the Adobe site, you'd be so-o-o-o wrong, Friend. That just doesn't work, because Adobe took over Shockwave from Macromedia a couple of years back, and it hasn't worked right since - because? - Because they separated the program's "Xtras" from the program itself, and these are special little plugins which perform certain functions in it. For example, one is SWADCmpr.x32 which is a decompressor for the SoundWave Audio. So how do you "fix" this problem?

Basically, you don't. You simply go back to a legacy version like version 8.5 or version 9.0 which has all its related Xtras built right in with it, and use that instead. But first, be sure that you download and use the special uninstaller program designed for removing all of any versions that might be in your system already. That's important, because those can be inside browsers or elsewhere, as well as in System32 in Windows, and must all be completely removed for the fresh install of another version to be successful. I'm now running Version 8, and it works fine. No thanks to Adobe, those pinheads!