Opening PPT slide convered to HTM in IE7 or active-x web-browser control

BACKGROUND:
I have some PPT slides that have been converted to HTM (ensuring that
the show slide animations while browsing checkbox is checked). The
original HTM slides have custom animations to allow movie (wmv)
playback on mouse click. (All animations have been verified to work
when viewing slides in ppt.) Further, I have ensured that the converted
HTM file(s) contain only relative file paths.

SITUATION #1
When I open the converted HTM file in my web browser everything works
fine except the wmv file never appears to load. When I hover my mouse
over the region on the page where the movie should appear the mouse
cursor changes (as expected) from an arrow pointer to a hand pointer -
but when I click in this region nothing happens!

I have verified this behavior on my local web server as well as my
team's development web server (two different machines) with the same
results (thinking that my local server may have some odd settings)
Also, I did verify that the MIME type mapping for wmv files existed on
my web server, "video/x-ms-wmv")

SITUATION #2
Using VS 2005, ASP.NET (and frames), I developed a web app that opens
the converted HTM file. When the navigation completes, none of the
images (little red x's appear instead) or the video get loaded... only
the text and background color of the converted HTM file are correctly
loaded. Again, when I hover my mouse over the region on the page where
the movie should appear the mouse cursor changes (as expected) from an
arrow pointer to a hand pointer - but when I click in this region
nothing happens!

SITUATION #3
Next, I was able to develop (using VS2003, VB.NET) a simple windows
based application that has an active-x web browser control - when I
navigate this web-browser to the converted HTM file, it opens correctly
and loads & plays the movie with out any problems. Works as designed!


Anyone have any idea why SITUATION's #1 and #2 fail to load properly?
The conversion of the PPT to HTM creates a diretly full of objects...
the main page that gets opened in the sub-folder has uses javascript to
control the media playback... could this be the source of the problem?

MORE BACKGROUND
What I am trying to accomplish is to migrate a windows based app
(VB.NET) to the web (ASP.NET). The windows based app, briefly described
in #3 above, simply has a tree view control docked (on a slider) to the
left hand side of the form and a web browser control filling the
remaining space in form. As the user clicks nodes in the tree view, the
app navigates the web-browser to different web pages. I thought
converting this to ASP would be a snap... another tree view control and
a couple of frames... but as you can tell I'm just having trouble
getting the converted PPT to HTM files loaded into a regular browser.

Any feedback/thoughts would be appreciated!

-celoftis (hzgt9b)

re: Opening PPT slide convered to HTM in IE7 or active-x web-browser control

I was a bit off in my first message regarding SITUATION #1:
I placed the converted HTM (and associated sub-folder) in two places:
(1) my local machine's web server (C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\) and (2) my
team's development server. Next I tried opening the files two ways: (A)
double click on the HTM in the file system (launches ie) and (B)
navigate my web-browser to each web site and manually type the name of
the page ("http://localserver/myConverted.htm", etc.). Here are the
results I got from these tests:

1A - My machine, open the HTM by double clicking the HTM
First, I get the ie "To help protect your security, Internet Explorer
has restricted this file from showing active content that could access
your computer. Click here for options...". After choosing "Allow
Blocked Content" and answering "Yes" on the Security Warning dialog
box, the page beings to load. All the images, text and background
colors load as expected. The first frame of the movie appears on the
screen and when I hover my mouse over the movie image the cursor
changes (as expected) from an arrow pointer to a hand pointer - but
when I click on the movie nothing happens!

1B - My machine, open the HTM navigating ie to the web site
("http://localserver/myConverted.htm")
When navigating to this page on my local web server, I get no security
warnings. The page loads and all the images, text and background colors
load as expected. The first frame of the movie does NOT appear on the
screen - but when I hover my mouse over the movie image the cursor
changes (as expected) from an arrow pointer to a hand pointer - again,
when I click on the movie nothing happens!

2A - Development machine, open the HTM by double clicking the HTM
When opening, by double clicking, on the HTM on my team's development
server, I receive no security warnings. The page loads and all the
images, text and background colors load as expected. The first frame of
the movie appears on the screen - and when I hover my mouse over the
movie image the cursor changes (as expected) from an arrow pointer to a
hand pointer. Finally, when I click on the movie PLAYS! Everything
works as expected in this situation!

2B - Development machine, open the HTM navigating ie to the web site
("http://localserver/myConverted.htm")
When navigating to this page on my team's development web server, I get
no security warnings.
Exact same results 1B from above.

I'm baffled - four (4) test cases; three (3) different results: one (1)
pass, two (2) fail with no movie image being loaded and no playback on
click, one (1) fails with the first frame of the movie image being
loaded but, again, no playback on click. Any idea what's going on here.
I'm curious about the security errors occurring locally but not from my
team's development server but they are not my real concern (unless
that's the source of the problem). The real problem for me is that the
movie will not playback... any ideas on how to get this to work? In my
final application I'll have hundred's of HTMs and WMVs - so manually
modifying the HTM is not too appealing. I suppose I could script
something if necessary...

Any thoughts?

celoftis