How to Clear the Cache in the Standalone Flash Player

At Thinkwell I am building a media-player application in Flash 8 (Actionscript 2) that loads a lot of external resources over HTTP (GIF and JPG images, SWF files, FLV files, etc). When testing the application from the Flash 8 development environment, I don’t want these assets to be cached. However, the standalone Flash Player that is launched when you click Control > Test Movie (or Ctrl-Enter) caches all assets by default.

I couldn’t find any information online or in the Flash developer documentation about how to tell the standalone Flash Player to stop caching, or where it was caching the data. I did some poking around on my system and discovered that it actually uses the same “Temporary Internet Files” folder used by Internet Explorer (in Windows XP):

C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files

To clear the cache, you can browse to this directory and delete the files by hand, or you can go to Control Panel > Internet Options > General and click Delete Files and click OK.

Perhaps this is documented somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t easy for me to find. Hope this saves someone else out there a little time.