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"Since Adobe will no longer be supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 and Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021, Adobe strongly recommends all users immediately uninstall Flash Player to help protect their systems," Adobe says.
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"Flash Player may remain on your system unless you uninstall it. Uninstalling Flash Player will help secure your system since Adobe does not intend to issue Flash Player updates or security patches after the EOL Date."
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Whatever that Microsoft "update" (let's call it a remover instead) does it leaves Flash Player intact on the system.
May not be able to use it anymore, but I would've thought they'd nuke it off the system. Running the Adobe Flash Player Uninstaller doesn't get rid of the leftover of it either.
The only thing I can see that's happened invisibly in the background when running that Microsoft remover was it removed the Control Panel icon for Flash Player settings, and made the .SWF extension useless.
As well as removing the CP icon it removed the .exe and all the other embedded Flash files when I ran it, but it did leave the empty FlashPlayer folder behind.
But it didn't remove them until I did a restart after running the KB; you have done a restart?
Where are you seeing remnants?
I'm still seeing a few registry entries, particularly potential file associations, from the built in Flash add-on for Edge/Edge Chromium, (presumably there will be some for Google Chrome itself and other Chromium based browsers if you have one installed?).
Although those browser add-ons should have been removed by now, or at least permenantly disabled.
I'm also seeing a 'FlashDebug' registry entry for Acrobat Reader DC.
There are probably more leftovers, I haven't searched the whole registry.
You can think of WinSXS (Windows side-by-side) as a merging of 'Windows.old' and the Component Store, so it will have old stuff in there from before it was removed to allow rollbacks of updates.
It also contains stuff from newly downloaded installs that hasn't been installed yet, links to binaries, etc., etc.
Disk Cleanup was the first thing I ran before I posted about WinSxS, it didn't do anything. Neither did using that Task Scheduler command in the link you provided, and that's as far as I'll go and I'll leave well enough alone because messing with the WinSxS folder is like opening a can of worms.
Already have received say 3 "update" messages from Flash itself. Then the program asked me to give my consent to remove Flash. Perhaps I will remove Flash at a later stage.
Is Flash still needed to play content (e.g. videos) on websites and in my mediaplayer(s) ? Support for Flash is supposedly removed for (a lot of ??) websites (Youtube ?). But videos are still playing well on Youtube.
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Already have received say 3 "update" messages from Flash itself. Then the program asked me to give my consent to remove Flash. Perhaps I will remove Flash at a later stage.
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Is Flash still needed to play content (e.g. videos) on websites and in my mediaplayer(s) ? Support for Flash is supposedly removed for (a lot of ??) websites (Youtube ?). But videos are still playing well on Youtube.
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Flash hasn't been needed on Youtube for quite a long time. It uses HTML5