Thanks for the reply, unSpawn. I had lost track of this post since it's so old. Are you guys on a "No Thread Left Behind" program?
That was a wierd time when the shuttle was about to launch and I couldn't get streaming media to work even though this box is a pretty vanilla Lenny install and has worked well. I figured out that the RAM was deleted or defunct; but never understood why the connection attempt would take down my router.
Part of my frustration was that the asx link was not working either (in VLC). Since I'd used VLC for this before I was scratching my head on this one too. I got it working fine (with a little wierdness) in Kaffeine.
Similarly, I've had some difficulty with avi files -- don't run in VLC anymore so I switched to Mplayer and that works okay (again, some wierdness).
Don't know what all this is about. Gut feel is that maybe with the latest saber-rattling and FUD some codecs are getting "tweaked".
Thanks again. Keep up the good work