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Adobe Shockwave Player is one of the hot applications with frequent updates and thus lots of work for packaging an deployment engineers. Before Windows Vista I used to repackage the Adobe plugins ( Shockwave and Flash players). But once our customers start using vista, the repackaged players caused lots of errors and support calls.  So I’ve decided to use the Adobe supplied msi’s via Adobe Enterprise Software distribution agreement.

Everything was good till last week when a few customers start getting  never ending MSI repair screens while using software with embedded Shockwave content. The investigation proved that some of the applications trigger a repair action of Shockwave MSI.  So as an alternative I’m going with the exe installer for Adobe Shockwave Player.

Downloading the Adobe Shockwave Player 11 Full EXE installer

In order to be able to deploy the Adobe web players the deployment engineer must sign up for an Adobe Account and request for a license.  Start here and use this page to request a license. You’ll need an Adobe ID to login; if you don’t have one create the account from the same page. An email will be waiting in the Inbox with a link to download the standalone installers for the Adobe Web Players.

A Quick and Dirty way of downloading the latest version Adobe Shockwave Player exe installer will be using this link. The file is named sw_lic_full_installer.exe.

Adobe Shockwave Player 11 Silent Deployment

It’s the easy part, the /S command line switch installs Adobe Shockwave Player silently.


path\sw_lic_full_installer.exe /S

Now for silent Uninstall, the following command will do just fine:

"C:\WINDOWS\system32\Adobe\Shockwave 11\uninstaller.exe" /S

Note:- Please note that the commandline is case sensitive. ie. A capital letter /S is correct; small /s will not work.

Disable automatic Update feature of Adobe Shockwave Player

The following registry key is handy for suppressing the update check for all the users.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Shockwave 11\AutoUpdate]
@="n"

Disable Anonymous Statistics collection of Adobe Shockwave Player

For privacy concerns you might want to add this one also.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Shockwave 11\collectstats]
@="n"

These registry keys must be added after the Shockwave install or they will be overwritten.