Flash Player / Content Loading Issues

Question

A big hello to anyone kind enough to read this!... Hopefully someone can can help me out or point me in the right direction.
The company that I am currently contracting for is involved in the testing of a number of pieces of Flash courseware that one of our associated companies have created. It has been authored in Flash CS3, but uses Actionscript 2.0. The user's target platform is Flash player 9 on Windows XP.
While testing the latest version through Flash player 9 (ActiveX within IE 7) we have discovered that the external movieclip loading does not work correctly, with the movie clips appearing in random location on some PC's, but no on others....
..To add even more strange-ness to this, if we right-click and select the "About Flash Player" menu option, wait for the Adobe web page to load, close the courseware window and re-launch it while the Adobe web page is still open in another browser, then the courseware runs fine.
Just wondering if anyone out there has run into similar problems? We are currently experimenting with various IE settings and other security issues such as MMS.cfg and Trust Files, but at the minute we have to admit we are stuck.
Attached are some images illustrating what is going: "correct_load.png" is when it works as it should do and "incorrect_load" is what it looks like when the troubles start.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Thanks for the advice..  At this point it's like banging our heads against a brick wall..
Strangely enough on some machines the problem does not seem to happen at all.  We have tried four PCs so far and two have worked, two have failed.  On the machines that failed to run it correctly we have recently uninstalled Flash Player 9 ActiveX and installed the latest Flash Player 10 ActiveX.
The same problem is present on the machines, despite the fact we have added the C:\path\to\content path to settings in the Settings Manager.
We have also added both Global and User Trust Files with the same path and an all-encompassing "C:\", which we know that the customer's machines will have limited installation rights and no access to the internet.  On the machines that do run the courseware, they do not either have the local paths as entries on the Settings Managers or in any kind of Trust File.  The only difference is that the machines that run the courses are machines that have a full version of Flash (either 8 and/or CS3) installed on them, but I can not see any reason while this would have an effect?
Like you mention, it would be a good place to start looking at the loading line by line - however, the Manchester branch of the group have pretty much refused to give us access the *.fla files (it's a (barely) working relationship between us, not really one built on trust).  I'll pass on your ideas and leave it up to them I think!  It would be sensible if we did have FireFox v. IE testing, but most unhelpfully, FireFox is on the list of "controlled applications" and so we can't use it here.
Anyway, thanks for the reply and help.  I was curious to see what effect having the Adobe page open had on the player, since with previous Flash content we as a company and myself personally have produced have not encountered anything like this.
Dave