Several months ago I re-installed Windows Vista Business SP1 and have been watching Netflix videos fine. The computer did an automatic update and loaded SP2, and upgraded Silverlight from v3 to v4. After the update, I could no longer watch Netflix online videos. I could get to the "Buffering" screen, but it hung at 0% and several minutes later told me "The Silverlight plugin has crashed". I got the same behavior in IE.

I contacted Netflix, who sent me to Silverlight/Microsoft. The short story is that Silverlight v4 is known to have trouble on Vista when viewing Netflix Online Videos. Downgrading to Silverlight v3 was the recommended fix (by Microsoft Support), and it worked great.

The link they sent me for Silverlight v3 is here: http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/handlers/getsilverlight.ashx?v=3.0 If this changes (because it's unpublished) best to call Netflix and go through channels to get to Microsoft.

Go to Control Panel and uninstall Microsoft Silverlight. Reboot. Then reinstall from the link above. Once up and running, view a Silverlight Video. Right-click to get Silverlight Options and turn off Silverlight's Automatic Update to prevent your system from updating to v4 again.

Oh, Edit. For the record this machine in question is a Win 7 64 bit system.

 Fully patched latest non beta IE and Firefox.
Solution toward bottom.

I spent over an hour last night chasing this problem around as it occured on one of my machines that I have not viewed Netflix on lately.

In my machines case neither IE nor Firefox 3.6.13 would succesfully play Netflix vids.
IE would flat out crash and the Flash plugin would crash in Firefox.

I tried all the 'fixes' I found via a Google search or three such as 

un-installing silverlight 4, reinstalling it, doing that again and going back to Silverlight 3 , (bad move it has known security risks), and doing other things that resulted in the same problem.

 My other machine, still had Silverlight 4 installed and works fine so the problem was elsewhere..somethign 'esoteric' I suspected.

Then I stumbled across a post by someone somewhere that mentioned that

debugger software could cause a problem and mentioned he fixed his.

I had no known debugger software. 
HOwever I had installed  Microsoft  Enhanced  Mitigation Experience Toolkit

some months back. I had forgotten about it.

TUrns out one simple setting that I had enabled for both Firefox and the 

PLUGIN COntainer in the aformentioned toolkit was the problem.

Simple fix for me after a couple hours of hair pulling was disabling 

the HeapSpray filter on the plugin-container.exe Once that was done, Netflix worked fine again on IE and Firefox.

It was a DOH moment.

For the record I enable all the other filters for a good number of 'suspect' apps

and heap spray is the one that can cause one the most grief on some. I simply forgot I had this toolkit installed and set to aggressive.

Might help some. good luck.
Oh, and no reason to go back to Silverlight 3.x guys. My Secunia bitched

when I did that due to known security holes in that.

Ok, I uninstalled Silverlight 4.0 installed the 3.0 version then I got this error when attempting to watch a Netflix video "error code: N8256-4001" So I uninstalled that version, stated Netflix and allowed the latest version to download and install, now I'm back to the plugin crashing again. I was watching videos just the day before yesterday and I think a Microsoft update may have come in, I'm not sure. Any help here would be most appreciated.

P.S. My computer won't even do a system restore successfully.  :>/

J.R.

I had the same problems over and over again, and it was driving me nuts! Until I discovered a very simple 'copy/paste' fix that works every time I get a Silverlight crash.

Simply find another PC with Silverlight installed (it doesn't seem to matter if it's a different version of windows), and find the Microsoft Silverlight folder (in 'Program Files" on theC drive). Now copy (right click and copy or Ctrl C) the entire Microsoft Silverlight folder on to a USB stick or CD.

Now, plug the USB stick or CD into the PC where Silverlight is crashing, and copy the Microsoft Silverlight folder into My Documents (or wherever you like to keep files for easy access).

• Important Note: Make sure all browser windows are shut down or this next step won't work.

Open this newly added Microsoft Silverlight folder, select all (Ctrl-A) of the files and folders within it and copy them (Ctrl C) Now, go to 'Program Files' on THIS computer, find the Microsoft Silverlight folder, and paste (Ctrl V) the new files into it (choose YES when asked to replace the files).

Voila. When you open your browser, Silverlight will work again.

Don't ask my how or why this works. It just does. I now keep the Microsoft Silverlight folder in My Documents, for whenever I get a crash, and simply copy/paste the files from there to the same named folder in Program Files.

Let me know if this works for you!

I was getting this error and tried everything. The only thing that worked was uninstalling Silverlight 4.0 and going back to 3.0, which I got from oldapps(dot)com

Reverting to old versions of Silverlight is highly unwise, to put it politely.

Your solution is not a solution if your at all concerned about security

risks, KNOWN ONES , in old versions of software. Silverlight has had to be updated many times due to security concerns.

People that do this are the people who you find later on whining about how they

have been haxored.

Sigh.

See my post above. It may or not apply to you, but my solution did not

force me to revert to some old crusty KNOWN security risk version of Silverlight.

IF i had no other creative option than to revert I WOULD REMOVE SILVERLIGHT. That would be the correct course of action rather than

reverting to the older versions.

Course , that is my opinion. Good luck.