Audio can no longer be edited, only synched; crashes system

Question

I have created a number of presentations in PowerPoint 2003 (.ppt), recorded my own voiceover narration, then published them to the web using Presenter 7.  Now, just a few months later, I have gone back to some of these presentations to update them.  When I open them in PowerPoint 2003 and try and edit the audio (which is also the best way to simply listen to the audio), the system crashes, saying a serious error has occurred.
All the audio files for each slide (eg, 1458677849.mp3) are still there in the 'audio' folder associated with the PowerPoint file, together with a matching file with suffix .lthmb for every .mp3 file).  I can play these .mp3 files simply by clicking on them and playing them with Windows Media Player or iTunes.  Indeed, if I select 'Synch audio' from the Presenter menu and hit the little green 'play' button, the audio plays fine there too.  But as soon as I click 'Edit audio', the whole thing comes crashing down.  This problem has occurred for a number of saved PowerPoint files, some of which were only saved a few months ago and have not been touched since being successfully published.
After a call yesterday to Adobe Customer support, I have applied the 7.0.1 and 7.0.2 patches but to no avail.
I have taken the PowerPoint (.ppt) files onto another computer running the same version of Adobe Presenter (supplied within Acrobat 9 Pro Extended).  This other compuer runs PowerPoint 2007.  Whether I open the saved PowerPoint 2003 files as 2003 (.ppt)  or convert them to PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files, the same thing happens.  I also get a Windows message saying there was a serious problem with the 'presenter powerpoint add-in', suggesting I disable it, which I have.
This problem is extremely frustrating.  I have created presentations with a lot of narration and do not want to spend hours re-recording and re-synching everything again.
It is worth saying that I had very similar problems with Presenter 6, which used to create a .ppc file containing the audio.  Almost every time I created a presentation, I would go back to make edits and, despite the .ppc file being many megabytes in size, it would be completely empty - all the audio had simply disappeared, sometimes just as a day after I'd saved them.  After nights of frustration and rage, it turned out the problem was known about.
The audio in Presenter 7 seems to have a self-destruct deathwish on itself.  It is shockingly unstable.  Please help.

Answer 1

This may help.  Audio files are actaully in the DATA folder.  These can be editted with Soundbooth then they must be imported intot the specific slide in the Powerpoint presentation.  Publish the presentation (as you'll read below) and *should* work This reply came from robva65 [email protected]
Let's try this: *Publish* the PPT deck you have.  What you'll end up with is a set of files and folders, but I want you to look for the *data folder* that's created as a result of the publishing process. (Unless you specify where you're publishing to, Presenter will publish to a directory called "My Adobe Presentations" by default, so you may have to look there on your harddrive)  Inside the data folder will be a list of mp3 files, which, if everything goes smoothly, should make it much, much easier to see which audio is used by a specific slide.
Here's what I mean: for example, after publishing, I have a data folder and inside I found the following file: a24x9x3.mp3  As I double click the mp3 file (which causes it to play using Windows Media on my laptop), I can hear that it corresponds to my slide 9 in my PPT deck.  And there's corresponding mp3 files for each and every slide I have in my deck.  I'm clicking another file (wouldn't it be nice to see what I'm doing???) a24x20x3.mp3, and that file corresponds to my slide 20 content in PowerPoint.
So again, give publishing in PowerPoint a shot and see if that makes it any easier.  Well...not nearly as easy as recording in Audition/Soundbooth/Audacity, but it's close enough to hopefully dig you out of that hole you're in now.
Hope this helps ~rich