First, Flash is Flash. "Shockwave" in this case is another brand name, but all official Flash ultimately comes from Adobe. There are third party alternatives (e.g. Gnash), but they are mostly targeted mainly at non-Windows and non-Mac platforms.

Second, since about July of 2010, Flash has been directly integrated into the Chrome browser. http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/ena...upport-in.html . There are various hardware issues that could be causing the crashes, e.g see http://www.google.com/support/forum/...9e88609e&hl=en .

What are you using Flash for? Is it an application or a video? If the latter, you can just download the FLV file and use VLC or another media player.