@rasz, @davehawley-

Many thanks for your excellent suggestions about my problem - sorry I didn't reply sooner; I've not been back to the forum for a while. Got frustrated and ended up using IE9 (never used it before!) with Task Manager manually setting the program priority to High and running nothing else to force the thing to perform without stuttering.

Firefox mis-rendered, and Vivaldi had too many modules to up the priority to stop it stuttering. Never heard of Pale Moon before - must take a squint!

Again, many thanks and I will now see if I can get Opera (which I've used since version 3 & which never stutters when running video streams) to work again - IE9 takes forever to load ....

Thanks Dave, good to know it's not something on my machine.

My installation of 12.18 has stopped launching Flash for one particular site, churchservices.tv. It worked fine after update from 12.17 until two mornings ago - now the page is rendered OK but there's a space where the flash popup should be. The contact person at the website says there have been no changes to the site recently.

The flash installation is .306 ie. latest. The last time I used it successfully for the site in question, I also had a copy of Realplayer open.

Other sites such as Youtube, and another church network mcnmedia launch the plugin OK, though the churchservices guy says they use a more recent edition of jwplayer than mcn.

I'm running Windows Vista 32bit on an old Amilo laptop. Never had an issue with the problem site using 12.17.

Any suggestions most gratefully received!