For years I never had one issue with Flash player. People whined and bitched about it crashing all the time. I never had it crash, not once and I had no idea why people hated it so much. Then I got a USB headset. It would appear that flash has a problem with switching between a USB headset and other audio devices. The moment I started switching the default audio device back and forth, Flash player started crashing constantly.... I couldn't pause a video without a crash once it started.
I always hated USB headsets because I didn't want to change the default audio device constantly, but they are definitely popular and I suspect that has been the main culprit in crashes. There is no way to determine if this is a Windows API problem, or a Flash player problem, but either way it's definitely the cause of the problems. If I don't want Flash to crash, I don't use my USB headset, and it runs perfectly.
Just thought I'd let people know if they were having Flash reliability issues, it could be because of that.