Presenter 8 freeze/crash when trying to edit/play audio or sync animations to audio

Hi, Jorma, thaks for your input. Allow me to be more specific: The Audio Import feature in PowerPoint seems to work fine. I have tried this with both WAVs and MP3s. I used Presenter 7 for years and knew it very well. I had my favorite workarounds for its many bugs. I was hoping that Presenter 8 would be less buggy, but it is appearing to be more of the same... but different.

In Presenter 8, importing audio correctly creates a folder with the same name as the PPTX in the same directory that the PPTX is saved. Audio in that folder also copies and is renamed with a numeric file name. The waveform also appears correctly in the Audio Edit window. However, when trying to Sync or play the audio in the Edit tool, PowerPoint freezes and the plugin crashes. I'll wait for a few minutes as my Windows 7 mouse cursor turns into the rotating loop timer icon, and then will be prompted that Powerpoint needs to close. Upon re-starting powerPoint, I'm asked if i want to disable the plugin. Doing so, then manually re-enabling, saving, exiting, restarting and trying to work in presenter 8 again gives me the same results.

The audio, if imported, will not only not play, but will crash the plugin. However, if I publish or preview the PowerPoint presentation, the audio is converted/generated and plays just fine in the resulting SWF.

When I recorded auio myself while synchrinizing animations, the audio associated with that slide worked as it should; it is only when i use audio that i have imported does it go wrong. In scouring the forums, i came across a sort of similar issue with an earlier version of Presenter 7 -- adobe released two alternate DLLs that, when downloaded, and saved to overwrite the existing ones, repaired the issue. However Presenter 8 is so new and my deadline for this project is so close that i'll be happy to jsut find a workaround.

What i am doing currently is manually moving each animation click stick in the Edit tool WITHOUT playing the audio. i am comparing the waveform of the audio in Audacity to the waveform in the Edit tool and dragging the click sticks to synch the animations. This takes about 3 times longer than jsut doing it as it is supposed to be done. But it works.

interesting additional discoveries:

• known issue about audio/animation synch only working when animations are set to 'on click" is true... if synching conventionally
• if synching using my compare-and-slide workaround, you CAN have animations "with previous" and "afte rprevious" and also 'on click with delay" ... rudimentary testing shows this, however i have not et done more thurough testing.