adobe flash microphone madness

[Lonni J Friedman]

I'm stumped with a bizarre scenario on a Fedora system that my son
uses.  My son has ongoing classwork which requires the use of a
website with a adobe flash content, where he needs to speak into the
microphone on his laptop to record audio.  It flat out never detects
any audio 100% of the time for him.  Doesn't matter which browser he
uses (tried both firefox & chrome), even if I blow away his entire
firefox profile, it still never detects any audio on the mic.  It is
detecting the microphone just fine (inside of flash, via the Adobe
Flash Player Settings -> Microphone tab), just never detects any
audio.  Also, the audio from the mic is detected ok outside of flash
(I can use other apps to record audio from the mic).  Its something
with flash

If I log him out, and myself back in, run firefox and go to the same
exact website, it works perfectly.  So something inside of his user's
account seems to be broken, but I can't figure out what.  I tried
blowing away his user's flash config (both ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia
) but that had no impact.

Any ideas?