Hi Harry, as much as Sidney and Denis were joking, they are right. It seems that IE8 updated some security settings and Adobe did not. A lot of people are having this issue. There are many different ideas on how to fix this and some are having luck with one idea, while others are not.
Since what Sidney suggested did not work, you may want to try and uninstall the Adobe Flash player from XP and then go to
Adobe and install it again. To uninstall, goto Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove programs and look for Adobe Flash Player. There may be multiple Flash programs installed. Uninstall all.
You can go to this link and it will tell you your version...
Version Test for Adobe Flash Player
Latest should be V10.x
Your best bet is really to download Mozilla Firefox, Chrome, Safari.... IE is too far integrated into the Microsoft OS and does cause these problems.
Dave
Addendum: I just ran IE8 on Windows 7 and there was no problem. I have two Flash programs installed, both seem to be the latest. Both are version 10, but I think they are slightly out of date. Adobe wants me to upgrade.