Windows – Global Windows Software Updater

Deleting /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist should be all you need, but it's possible that the settings lives in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist as well or even via MCX (Managed Client for Mac OS X). You can check the MCX settings by running sudo mcxquery -user shortusername | grep Update

Exact answer is here. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/750559

This one was an entertaining puzzle, it's probably been answered elsewhere but I thought I'd let curious people know. As someone mentioned, it is the plugin module (NPSWF32.DLL in case of Netscape/Mozilla/Opera plugin) that does the check; thing is, it does not prompt the user to update immediately (it would not be able to do so with the browser open and the DLL in use anyway), but rather it defers the update until the next restart -- by adding a registry entry in HKLM (or HKCU, not positive)\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce key.

The entry is named FlashPlayerUpdate and contains <system root>\System32\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil<version>_Plugin.exe -update plugin -- presumably the same command line you would run if you wanted to update the player manually (without the hassle with opening and closing your web browsers). The reason you don't see it in registry or with system tools like msconfig.exe is that RunOnce autostart entries are deleted from registry immediately once they are executed. Normally such entries are used by driver and Windows installations to perform one-time initialization after a reboot (once the required services are started and drivers loaded). So you would have seen that entry with msconfig, had you looked at it after the update check (which the plugin does silently), but before the reboot!