News reports appearing today indicate that Adobe (and Apple) are in the process of an "emergency" Update Tuesday, with major critical security releases officially available beginning today (Tuesday, 22 March 2011).
Your failure to download Flash successfully may have been the result of "pre-release" activity at the download website(?).
[quote] Bad guys have been using hole to attack PC users via infected files
By Paul Wagenseil SecurityNewsDaily 3/22/2011
It's Patch Tuesday for the second time this month — except this week it's Adobe and Apple, not Microsoft, products that have urgent security updates.
Adobe yesterday released updates for its Acrobat and Reader applications and Flash Player browser plug-in to patch a dangerous vulnerability reported last week.
Bad guys had already been using the hole to attack PC users via Excel files infected with bad Flash objects.
The vulnerability affects all major PC operating systems (Windows, Mac and Linux), plus a minor one (Oracle's Solaris) and Android OS smartphones, as well as all browsers.
Google's Chrome got a jump on the Flash Player patch a few days earlier, thanks to a tight relationship with Adobe. Users running Chrome will still have to patch other browsers and the stand-alone Reader and Acrobat applications.
As has been the case for years, Internet Explorer requires a separate Flash Player plug-in from the other browsers.
Apple iOS devices will not need a patch; Steve Jobs' ban on Flash for the iPhone and iPad seems to extend to Acrobat and Reader as well. (iOS reads PDF files natively.)
All patches are available from Adobe's website here.
Slightly less urgent, but no less comprehensive, is Apple's latest and possibly final major update to its Snow Leopard version of OS X. This one bumps the version number up to 10.6.7 and patches 40 vulnerabilities in Apple and open-source apps and services, many related to the handling of image files.
Sophos's Naked Security blog notes that the update also boosts Apple's Safari browser to 5.0.4, which patches another 60 or so security holes.
Similar security upgrades are also available for OS X 10.5 Leopard, the last version of OS X to run on PowerPC-based Macs.
Apple's OS X 10.7 Lion is scheduled to come out this summer. Apple's Software Update should automatically download the updates and prompt users to install them.
[end quote]
Since the servers may be busy with automatic downloads to people who are set up for them, there could be some difficulty getting in for manual downloads, although it wouldn't hurt to make a try.
Note the comment above that different browsers require different patches, so for manual updates it would be best to use the same browser for the download as the one you're trying to patch.