Hi.
Based on the information you have provided, what's happening is not a Flash Player auto-update attempt. There are two types of auto-updates, background and notification. Background updates do just that, they update in the background without any user interaction. Notification updates display a clearly branded Adobe Flash Player notification dialog window informing the user an update is available and asks if they want to download/install or not. Furthermore, the notification update dialog does not display when content is viewed. When viewing Flash content, at pre-determined intervals (default = 7 days, unless updates have been disabled), the Player will send a request to determine if an update is available. If an update is encountered a registry entry is created and the notification dialog displays the next time the machine is rebooted, or the user logs out/in. This behaviour is on Windows, Mac (which you are not referring to) is different.
The screen-shot you post is the User Access Control Windows system dialog prompting to elevate the permissions to install software, in this case, Adobe Flash Player. I suspect the content is coded to look for a specific version of Flash Player, and if that version is not encountered it is coded to download the installer, normally this type of install will also display a warning at the bottom of the browser indicating the website is attempting to install an add-on. Of course, if IE is configured to not display this, it won't, and it'll jump straight to the User Access Control Windows system dialog window you're seeing.
- What version of Flash Player, if any is installed on the system? You can go to www.adobe.com/products/flash/about and a widget on the page will detect which version is installed.
- What version of Flash Player does the content require?
- To confirm which type of download is happening you can download and install something like Charles Proxy (www.charlesproxy.com) and have it running/monitoring network traffic when the user navigates to the page that displays this Windows system dialog. If you see a request to macromedia.com for swflash.cab file then this is the web content initiating the install. If you don't see this, you can private message me the log file and I'll view it to attempt to determine which installation method is being initiated.
Hope this helps.
--
Maria