Adobe flash wont load

I am trying to help my daughter reload flash player.

Dell Inspiron (about 5 years old) running XP.

Her laptop was very slow. The hard disc is 89% full. So I did a Dell tune
up and a registry clean up and removed unneeded programs, and did a disc
defrag.

I checked and found many Adobe folders, most for outdated versions, so I
deleted all with the idea of reloading, but attempting download from the
Adobe site always causes the computer to freeze.

So I downloaded Adobe reader on my own computer and did an install on hers -
that worked fine.

However when I did this for flash player, programs calling for flash player
dont run and ask me to download flash player, which if I attempt to do so
causes a freeze again.
How can I get flask player onto this computer?
.