boy, i was sure this was going to do it, but there were miniscule changes.
1. unticked the hardware acceleration thingy - now when Arte talks, his voice and mouth are synced. but, the Wheel of Wow still goes in slow motion, as does just about everything else. timers that count down take about 3 seconds of real time per 1 clock second on the site.
2. disabled AVG & clicked default on the security settings, with no change.
3. went to the system-wide setting for hardware acceleration and turned that all the way down, with no change.
4. (hope this wasn't jumping ahead) per the Adobe site, if videos run slowly after adjusting the hardware acceleration, user should check for updates to the drivers on the video card. this took me like 4 hours to find a driver for my Velocity 128 card that might be newer than what i had, which also worked with XP. installed that and arghhh! NO CHANGE!
then i went to bed. boo.
i'm kind of getting the impression that my card is too old to work with current versions of Flash Player - or not very compatible with XP. is this something i can upgrade? how do i know if it's integrated or can be swapped out? should i try an older version of Flash? any other suggestions?
thanks for hanging in there with me, you guys

~chris