I'm a computor novis, and I need help with adobe flash player please?

My computor failed to work when I switched it on, then it rebooted it's self, when I tried to look at my mail, it had to re-start the browser, it told me that I needed a adobe flash player update. I went to the link it provided and proceeded to download flashplayer 9, it said that it had intalled correctly, but when I went back to the desktop, the only thing there was the old adobe 8 symbol, so I don't know if it has installed it. I searched for adobe flash player in my programms but couldn't find any at all.I went back onto the net to find adobe downloads again, I found flashplayer freeware, but it said there was a flashplayer 10. So, I don't know if I have flash player 9, and I don't know if I should try to download flash 10 and if it didn't install at all after all, I don't know why and don't know how to find out. As you can see, I have a tremendous lack of knowledge about this, don't want my PC to have to reboot it's self again. Any help very very much appriciated. Thank you,