A few weeks back, I blogged about an apparent bug that kept crashing Internet Explorer on the thin clients with XP embedded (XPE) that I have been testing out.

The flaw affected three out of the five terminals I had in IT Week Labs, but the vendors I contacted were at a loss to explain the problem. I reported the issue to Microsoft, and the company has eventually got back to me with an explanation.

As we in IT Week Labs suspected, the problem appears to be with Adobe's Flash browser plug-in and not Internet Explorer or XPE itself. Microsoft told me that the issue is likely to affect older versions of Flash, and so I checked which versions were installed on the thin clients under test.

All the terminals that exhibited the problem turned out to have versions of Flash Player 6 embedded in their firmware build, while those that appeared to be immune to the bug had Flash Player versions 7 or 8.

While this does not appear to be a serious problem, companies looking to deploy XPE thin clients should ensure they are updated with a more recent version of Flash Player or be prepared to update the firmware themselves.