PP 2007 Sound wont play

[Pete]

We are attempting to run a Powerpoint presentation that has some
embedded sounds (wav files) on a couple of the slides. This presentation
works fine on XP.

However, on a new Vista Home Premium 64 running PP2007, the sounds don't
play. We have been in touch with the author of the presentation, who
sent us the wav files and suggested placing them in the same directory
as the pp file. No joy. Morever, Windows Media Player refused to play
them: The Player might not support the file type or might not support
the codec that was used to compress the file ..."

Then it was suggested that we install Winamp and make it the default
player for wav files. The wav files will play directly in Winamp, but
when the PP presentation is run, there is still no sound. Interestingly,
the slides where the sound is supposed to play hesitate and run jerkily,
where before Winamp was set as the default wav player, the slides ran
smoothly.

A different PP from the same source gave the following error:

InstallConstruct Setup has stopped working
Problem signature
Problem Event Name APPCRASH
Application Name: inA3.exe
Application Version: 5.4.0.0
Application Timestamp 41ed2516
Fault Module Name COMCTL32.dll
Fault Module Version 6.10.6001.800
Fault Module Timestamp 4791a752

 

[Pete]

We are attempting to run a Powerpoint presentation that has some
embedded sounds (wav files) on a couple of the slides. This presentation
works fine on XP.

However, on a new Vista Home Premium 64 running PP2007, the sounds don't
play. We have been in touch with the author of the presentation, who
sent us the wav files and suggested placing them in the same directory
as the pp file. No joy. Morever, Windows Media Player refused to play
them: The Player might not support the file type or might not support
the codec that was used to compress the file ..."

Then it was suggested that we install Winamp and make it the default
player for wav files. The wav files will play directly in Winamp, but
when the PP presentation is run, there is still no sound. Interestingly,
the slides where the sound is supposed to play hesitate and run jerkily,
where before Winamp was set as the default wav player, the slides ran
smoothly.

The problem file was originally a PP2003 presentation. It opened in
PP2007 but as explained in the original post, wouldn't play sounds.
PP2003 viewer was installed in Vista, but not only didn't this solve the
sound problem, it did not perform very well even viewing the slides.

The following may be a brute force technique, but it worked. I suspect
that there is some sort of Vista "security" feature preventing the
original wav files from being played by WMP 11. Also, even though I set
Winamp to be the default player for wav files, PP2007 insisted on using
WMP anyway.

I used a free audio file format converter to convert all of the wav
files to another format. I selected, at random, MPEG-4. I then
re-converted all of the MPEG-4 files back to WAV. At this point, WMP
would play the files but the PP presentation still balked.

In PP2007, using Custom Animation, I re-linked the effects to the
converted wav files (even though the converted files had replaced the
original files with the same names in the same folder). According to PP,
the files were in fact linked, rather than embedded (all of the files
were > 100KB, which was the default cut-off for linking rather than
embedding, and the "Options" menu showed the path to the files rather
than reporting that the files were part of the presentation).

My immediate problem is solved, but if anyone knows, I'd appreciate
thoughts on:

1. How do you make PP2007 use a program *other than* WMP to play sound
files linked to and/or embedded in a PP presentation?

2. How do you disable DRM or other security on wav files to allow WMP to
play them?

2a. If DRM or the like isn't the issue, why did WMP play wav files
(which were encoded using the MS codec (codec ID #1)) only after they
were converted and re-converted?

3. What happened when I re-linked the files?