At least, that is my most recent experience. Earlier today, when I turned on my computer and even before opening a browser, an alert popped up on my screen saying an update to Flash Player (FP) was available and it was prompting me to allow it to install. I installed this update and it was immediately applied to FIREFOX and Opera.

Now, IE has always required separate updating. So, I opened IE, went to Adobe's website, downloaded the FP update and attempted to install it. It would not install until I opened Programs and Features (Windows 7) and uninstalled the older version for IE. The odd thing about this is that the instructions on Adobe's website for INSTALLING the update in IE make no mention of removing the older version. This implies that removing the older version is not necessary and, historically, it has not been necessary to uninstall the older version of FP for IE before installing an update to FP.

Is this consistent with your experience?soybean,Scroll down on this site until you get to the "vista/win 7 part. Looks like this is a KNOWN issue on some computers.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/191/tn_19166.html#main_Vista7 good luck,truenorthFor IE.....which i don't use very often i've had to use the UNINSTALLER 1st...from the Adobe site.Apparently, the Flash Player installation for IE behaves differently from Windows XP to Windows Vista/7, as indicated in the link truenorth posted. I just updated Flash Player for IE in my Win XP system and did not need to uninstall the older version first.