The Russian instructor brought some issues to our attention in Lab C, and they also proved to be the same in Lab B. The problem was initially confused by the fact that she was trying to access audio on her own site, which turns out to be partly down, so her audio files were not actually available. But when we started looking at other sites with audio, it quickly became obvious that there's something wrong. This is the issue:

On Firefox, the default media player for a wide range of material, including MP3s, is VLC. Unfortunately, VLC is broken on this build. If you try to load an MP3 file from a browser link, you get nothing (or sometimes you get a QuickTime logo with a question mark, for some reason). But nothing happens. If you try to start VLC manually from the Start menu, it fails with an error to the effect that it can't load its skin file. The skin file is there, but it won't load it, and it prompts you to choose another one. If you choose any of the available skin files, nothing happens -- the app just disappears.

On IE, I'm not sure what is configured as the default MP3 player, but you get the same behaviour: the QT logo with a question mark, and no audio.

For the instructor today, I showed her how to save a file to the desktop from a web link; once you do that with an MP3 file, it opens in Sanako, so that's fine.

There are probably two different ways to fix this, depending on your attachment to VLC. If VLC can be fixed, then great; but if not, then another player needs to be chosen as the default for all the media types currently assigned to VLC; the browser could either shell out to Sanako, or perhaps use QuickTime.

Also, Lab C station 20 is broken. It starts up, and it will let you log in, but once you log in, you just get a purple screen with a mouse cursor, and no desktop; after that it won't respond to anything.