Hi,
Great news! The next version of Flash Player (currently in beta) will support multi-threading (concurrency) which means it can perform heavy duty tasks like converting captured WAV data from your microphone into small, light weight MP3 before uploading it to a server. This used to stop all other actions in the player giving the impression that it had frozen/crashed.
This is great for developing web apps to handle multimedia and doing intensive operations with big chunks of data.
More here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplatformruntimes/flashplayer11-4/