Safari for Windows Flash Plug In?

I've downloaded and installed (or so I thought) the flash plugin
numerous times on Safari but still get the "?" box on sites using flash.
Any else have this problem or a solution?

Now onto another topic. The reason I tried Safari in the first place is
that it claimed to be faster than IE7. I've read people say this is not
true on forums but decided to give it a shot as I wasn't happy with IE7.
Basically I would have IE7 open with several tabs and at some point it
would start hogging 90+% of my CPU resources and my computer
became unusable. Once I killed it via task manager I could work with
my machine again. This kept happening.

With Safari (so far) my computer runs a hell of a lot faster and
smoother. Got a couple of websites that don't show up right but with
a beta release you have to expect that. I have an older XP Pro laptop
and it seems more and more bogged down. I did a whole system
reinstall from scratch about a month ago, ran defrag, etc. and have
Norton Internet Security running to keep the bugs out.

Any help on that issue would be great to.