I was trying to view a free landscape designer, BBC Gardening Design, which requires the Shockwave Player. I must not have had the right version for Firefox, and it prompted me to install version 11. The automatic install failed, and I went to Adobe’s site for a manual install of Shockwave. But the landscape application said, “this application requires an Xtra (Shockwave 3D) that either does not exist or failed to initialize”. So I did some searching and finally came to a post that said I needed to download the FULL version of shockwave that includes more Xtras. Here’s the direct link for English; it has Win95 in the title but I hoped it still worked on Vista. Here’s an alternate downloads page for Shockwave players. Turns out, there were still more Xtras that were missing when I tried it in Firefox! I decided to try the Slim version in Internet Explorer and guess what, it seems to work. Maybe I need to restart Firefox. Why don’t they just make the application in Silverlight, it seems much easier to install!!