Webplayer autoupdates, is absolutely nonfunctional

The webplayer today autoupdated itself. At first it would only function in Firefox, and in IE or the Delphi browser [which we are using to embed Unity in another application] would report "Error launching Unity Player" with details that it failed to load Unity.dll and OpenAL.dll

After multiple attempted uninstall/reinstall it now does not function in any browser. I have tried all of the following.
Run browser as administrator.
Install webplayer from command prompt as administrator using the /Allusers switch.
Uninstall Unity, UnityWebPlayer, UnityVS. Manually delete everything left in the Program File (x86)/Unity folder, reboot, reinstall Unity 4.2.1 [the original version installed on this computer] letting it install the webplayer.

Tried installing via UnityWebPlayerFull.exe

Done all of these with antivirus disabled.

None of these have fixed the problem [same results for any Unity webplayer app], and neither Unity.dll or OpenAL.dll appear anywhere on the hard drive.

I'm at a complete loss what to try next.

 

After restoring to a system restore point from yesterday, before the webplayer updated itself, and setting the "UNITY_DISABLE_PLUGIN_UPDATES" environment variable to prevent autoupdate. The player functions in Firefox, but not in any other browser [has to be able to run in other browsers for our product].

 

Can you reproduce it on any other machine or is it just one?

 

We can't afford to risk any other machine being unable to run the webplayer, so have already disabled auto-update via the environment variable.

 

I restored to an even older system restore point from a week ago. Now it is back to not working even in Firefox. Even if I reinstall Unity 4.2.1 [allowing it to reinstall the webplayer], it does not work online or offline [using a webplayer built for offline deployment].

I have also used CCleaner to clear the cache for all browsers.

 

I did the steps from this post http://en.board.bigpoint.com/bsgo/showpost.php?p=2774210&postcount=106 where people had the same problem with BSG online. And while this did actually make what appeared to be a functioning webplayer, it won't load any of our webplayer apps [or anything recent] since that's a very old version of the webplayer. Reinstalling Unity 4.2.1, Unity 4.2.2, or the current UnityWebPlayer.exe or UnityWebPlayerFull.exe still gives the same errors about "error launching Unity webplayer"

 

On a separate computer that is not connected to the internet, I installed the current UnityWebPlayerFull.exe, after which is correctly runs our webplayer apps. I copied the entire users/username/AppData/LocalLow/Unity/WebPlayer folder on to the PC that does not run the webplayer, and it still does not work.

 

I finally got it working. It seems that the autoupdater somehow causes the install folders to be incorrect. I discovered this via opening the log file from
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\UnityWebPlayer\log

Where it reported
131113 11:52:07 loader: unity dll not found: C:/Users/zoea/AppData/LocalLow/Unity/WebPlayer/player/3.x.x/webplayer_win.dll

the player folder did not have a 3.x.x folder at all. The closest I could find on my HD was a "stable3.x.x" folder [I forget it's original location] that was in fact recently installed files. I renamed this 3.x.x and moved it to the location above that Unity was expecting it.

After this the webplayer still did not function, but the log now reported
Unable to load mono library from "C:/Users/zoea/AppData/LocalLow/Unity/WebPlayer/mono/3.x.x/mono-1-vc.dll" (error = 126).

The mono folder listed here did not even exist, so I copied it from a different PC that was successfully running the webplayer, and it now functions.

I have no idea what is different about this PC that the webplayer autoupdate screwed up install folders for all subsequent installs, even after system restores; especially as this computer has a fresh Windows 7 install as of 6 weeks ago, but hopefully someone at Unity can figure it out and fix the updater. We will definitely be disabling autoupdate for users that install our software as external forces rendering our software nonfunctional is not an option.

 

Also, it should be noted that on my laptop that functioned correctly after running UnityWebPlayerFull.exe, instead of update via internet [PC disconnected] the dlls are installed to Users/Username/AppData/LocalLow/Unity/WebPlayer/player/Stable3.x.x instead of the .../player/3.x.x that the webplayer on this PC expects it to be at.