I am also one of the people who experienced the lockups/freezes with flash 10 on my X64 Vista OS. I went back to version 9 and everything is working great now.
Below are the steps I followed to get flash 9 going in FF and IE32. If you don't want to use IE32 or FF, you would need to select the alternate archived files for your favorite browser. This procedure is not a guarantee (going back to version 9), but it worked for me and seems to be working for many others. Anyhow, hope it helps by posting it on this thread. Here were my steps below:
Temporarily shut off any anti-virus programs, and possibly shut down the side bar on Vista.
Go to Adobe's site and download and run the uninstall program for flash to get version 10 off your PC entirely.
Restart your PC and go to the following web site:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewCon ... &sliceId=2 (or use any other site of your choosing that hosts the archived versions of Adobe Flash)
Download the giant zip file for archived versions of Adobe Flash (Flash Player 9) (139 MB)
Unzip the big zip file known as fp9_archive
Inside the fp9_archive folder is a subfolder called 9r151 (this is the folder to open to get to the subfolders for what is the latest version of Flash "within" the version 9 series for Firefox (FF) and Internet Explorer for Windows users
Upon opening this folder (9r151), there is a subfolder called flashplayer9r151_win (this is the folder to run to get flash version 9 going in FF near the bottom of the list)
Also, within the 9r151 folder, there is another folder called flashplayer9r151_winax (this is the folder to run to get flash working inside Internet Explorer (IE32) (also near the bottom of the list)
Note: these are two different folders here....one for FF and one for IE32
After installing both of these, restart the system again and upon opening both browsers, flash (version 9.0.151.0) should be working in both of these specific browsers
Again, the procedure above would need to be slightly modified for those people running X64 Vista and who want to use browsers other than FF or IE32.