Ok, folks, two problems.

1. Can't hear the audio from video files:

I can hear the system sounds and Amarok play music fine...but VLC Media Player and Kaffine don't. They play the videos fine, but no audio. Same with YouTube videos. I did get some success getting Dragon Player to work, but that brings me on to my second problem;

2. Dragon Player and KMail configuration tool locks up my system.

Windows go strange, desktop freezes, and mouse will only move a few centimeters at a time It'll freeze no matter what I'm doing, and it dosent resolve itself, I have to reset the machine. I found out about Kmail's tool doing it because I was looking for a way to get Kmail into the system tray and to set it to check for new messages automatically. (Neither of which it does by itself.

2 1/2. Can Kmail sit in the system tray? God knows it's annoying to sit with it on my taskbar and not even have it automatically check for new messages...

Cheers,

-Dante

seems like alsa isn't set properly, phonon can autoconfigure which output to play from, but vlc media player can't, cause it doesn't use phonon, about kaffeine i duno.
About dragon player & kmail settings (where you can turn on the systray), install iotop, run ksysguard and then monitor the system's behaviour while using dragonplayer. i suspect there is something with kio file that is messy.
Couple of days ago my system would freeze while running amarok, fixed it by fsck-ing my / partition

KMail has an option to sit in the System Tray, it is part of Appearence options in KMail > Settings > Configure KMail.

Heh, the exact menu causing me problems :P

I activated a plasmaoid to see the logs; pulseaudio complained it didn't have group access and thus couldnt activate itself (I'm wondering why Pulseaudio is even with me....hmmm)

Pulseaudio is not recommended to be used with the Xine Phonon backend ( the recommended one ) since it causes conflicts and other issues. Please ensure Pulseaudio is disabled.

Well, here's the odd part. I don't recall ever having installed PulseAudio.


Oh, by the by, my problems with the menu and DragonPlayer were compositing problems, disabling desktop effects got them running...now, if only I could find how to get DragonPlayer playing FLVs....

Probably installed by distribution default..... I gutted it from my system since it caused too many problems.

You will need to install the Xine FFMpeg integration package ( libxine1-ffmpeg on Kubuntu I think ) and make sure you have the Xine backend selected in System Settings > Multimedia.