How many areas of the computer does Adobe Flash Player affect?

The wording was a little strange, but what programs does Adobe Flash Player influence?
Because it seems that every single day, Flash will crash on Firefox, and then Microsoft Word will freeze up, and then I can’t access Windows Explorer where I have organized my documents into files. And the iTunes stops playing. I just updated Flash, but I would still like to know why it happens.
Does Flash influence all the programs I mentioned?