I feel your pain. I work in IT at my university, and it is always a hassle updating mundane things like Adobe, Java, Flash, Firefox, etc.
But that's what I get paid for.

As cryptodan said, if you start letting everybody do their own updating, you're opening a can-o'-worms that is nigh impossible to keep control over. How will you know who is up-to-date if you aren't doing the updates?
You can push Flash
through Group Policy if you use the
.msi distribution.
Run it like this:
\\serverName\share\pathToFlash\install_flash_player_10_active_x.msi ALLUSERS=1 /qb /norestart
And the same for the plugin version:
\\serverName\share\pathToFlash\install_flash_player_10_plugin.msi ALLUSERS=1 /qb /norestart
I have not tried this myself, but it should work just fine.
Edited by keyboardNinja, 17 November 2010 - 11:32 AM.