I've recently installed Mandrake 9.1 on my Acer laptop, and I'm trying to get the flash plugin working for Mozilla 1.3.1. I downloaded the tar.gz file from the macromedia mirror and followed the instructions I found here on linuxquestions at /questions/history/53961.
I logged in as root, unzipped and opened the flash-installer*tar.gz and followed the instructions in the readme file. The installation program asked where my mozilla directory was, and I told it /usr/lib/mozilla-1.3.1. The program seemed to work fine and I exited it.

When I then opened mozilla and went to a flash page, mozilla instantly closed. It didn't give me any error messages or freeze or anything, it just closed instantly. (Maybe that's the same as crashing, I'm not sure)

I then went to the /usr/lib/mozilla-1.3.1/plugins directory, and saw that the installation program had copied flashplayer.xpt and libflashplayer.so into that directory. I deleted those two files, and then reopened mozilla, and it was the same as if I had never installed the plugin. So then I manually copied those two files into the mozilla /plugins directory, and tried it again. Same result. Mozilla crashed(?) instantly upon trying to open a page with flash. I can't think of anything else I could do. Any help here?

Try running mozilla from a terminal and see if it returns any error messages. You might want to try installing from an rpm as well. Don't think it will make much of diference, but it's worthy trying

you need to get the very latest flash plugin. mozilla hangs on flash pages if the sound is curently in operation on the machine (are you playing music while you are doing this?)