If any of you have recently updated your Ubuntu packages, you may have found a previous working instance of Adobe Flash player to now be broken. This problem seems to have occurred with 32 and 64-bit versions.

The solution that worked for my system was to run the following command:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

You’ll see a bunch of packages being downloaded/updated/etc. In particular you’ll notice the following:

2010-11-06 15:34:54 (1007 KB/s) - `./adobe-flashplugin_10.1.102.64.orig.tar.gz' saved [4970105/4970105]

Download done.
Flash Plugin installed.

Restart your web browser and Flash should once again be working.