Shockwave.com won't load games - niece is outraged. I must fix!

[kranky]

My niece is spending the weekend with us and she loves to play games on shockwave.com. Last time she was here it worked fine. Now it just displays a black rectangle where the game window would be and that's it. She's going to drive me to mayhem with her whining if I can't fix it.

Using Win 7 64 bit. Both IE8 and Firefox behave the same way. I uninstalled/reinstalled both Flash and Shockwave. Shockwave games on minishockwave.com seem to work fine (but the games she wants to play are only on shockwave.com). Haven't done anything of note to the system since she was last here a couple weeks ago.

Only answer I could find googling was that someone had the same problem because ad.doubleclick.net was blocked in their hosts file, and I checked that - not blocking it.

Any ideas welcome.

 

[daniel49]

maybe its a site problem? which game are you trying to play?

test here to see if its a plugin problem.
http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/

 

[kranky]

Yeah, the tests on the Adobe site work fine.

She's trying to play something called "clusterz". I tried a number of games on shockwave.com and none of them work. All just show a black square where the game should appear.

 

[daniel49]

tried that game in linux wouldn't load either although other games would.
so tried it in XP and it loaded fine.
Must be a security block on your system?
clusterz is very similar to frozen bubble though.
http://www.magickeys.com/books/games/
maybe that will do?
click on the applet then press up to start.
3 marbles adjoined causes them to fall

from shockwaves site:
Shockwave isn't loading properly. Is it the site or is my Shockwave Player not working?
In most cases, this is only a temporary connection issue. Trying again later should resolve it. If it persists, it's likely because Shockwave Player is only partially installed, damaged, or has a mix of components from different versions. Any of these situations can be fixed by uninstalling, then reinstalling the Shockwave Player.

You can download an uninstaller for Mac OS and Windows:

Shockwave Player uninstaller (Mac OS)
Shockwave Player uninstaller (Windows) http://download.shockwave.com/pub/shockwave/uninstaller/swuninstaller.exe
After you've uninstalled Shockwave Player, you can reinstall it.