Web Service Issue - Security or Coding problem? *HELP*

Question

Hello all - I am stuck on a particular problem, which I've posted under flash player but also will post here in the event that it's my issue, and not a security/player issue.
I have built a video player in Flash/ AS3 which communicates with WSDL web services using the as3webservice code package from wellconsidered. The player makes a call at startup to check a user's progress in a series of videos, and updates that progress by talking to the web service as the videos are played back.
Tested locally, it works flawlessly. As soon as the player is uploaded, however, the web service' hangs' - so no fault is produced, but it seems to just never connect. This is presumably because the SWF is on one server, the web service on another. I've tried uploading it to two different servers, both different than the web service server. I'm trying to avoid moving the web service to the same server that hosts the SWF.
I've tried adding a crossdomain.xml file to the root and subdirectories of the server that hosts the web service:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM
"http://www.adobe.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
    <site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>
    <allow-access-from domain="*"/>
    <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*"/>
</cross-domain-policy>
I've also tried playing with the SWF publishing options (Local Access only vs. Network only options), but no solution seems to help. I know it's not just the web service i"m using, because public web services (such as the ones found on webservicex.net) don't connect either.
I'm at the end of my rope, and am wondering if this is a Flash Player security issue, or something I need to reconsider from my side (such as using a different web services package).I am wondering if a crossdomain.xml does not help, what other possible areas do I need to look at? If there is an article someone could point me to, or a simliar situation they've been in, i'm iopen to all suggestions.
Thanks so much...fg

Answer 1

You can generally check what the player is doing from the browser by using firefox with the firebug plugin. For example you can see the crossdomain permission requests or other urlrequests and responses. This is a useful way to debug as it sometimes shows issues or at the very least means you can eliminate one potential cause of the issue if there are no obvious problems there.
If you don't have firefox/firebug, then (if you can) post a url with the swf in it that exhibits the error and I or someone else can check it for you and report back.