Others have reported Alice 2.2 "hanging" following the splash screen.
I am having seemingly related but different problems after upgrading my laptop to Windows 7.

Most of the time Alice "hangs" following the splash screen, but very occasionally it actually opens and runs.

On the rare occasion that it does open, worlds are not running correctly. For example, in the FlightSimulator example seems to run fine until about the second ring. Then I get a crash followed by:
Alice version: 2.2 8/1/2009

*****Running World*****
*****Stopping World*****
*****Running World*****
Exception in thread "JMF thread: com.sun.media.PlaybackEngine@62bba7 ( prefetchThread)" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Requested value 7.9588003 exceeds allowable maximum value 6.0206.
at javax.sound.sampled.FloatControl.setValue(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.media.sound.DirectAudioDevice$DirectDL$Gai n.setValue(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.media.renderer.audio.device.JavaSoundOutpu t.setGain(JavaSoundOutput.java:157)
at com.sun.media.renderer.audio.AudioRenderer.initDev ice(AudioRenderer.java:294)
at com.sun.media.renderer.audio.JavaSoundRenderer.ini tDevice(JavaSoundRenderer.java:125)
at com.sun.media.renderer.audio.JavaSoundRenderer.ope n(JavaSoundRenderer.java:91)
at com.sun.media.BasicRendererModule.doPrefetch(Basic RendererModule.java:157)
at com.sun.media.BasicTrackControl.prefetchTrack(Basi cTrackControl.java:98)
at com.sun.media.PlaybackEngine.doPrefetch1(PlaybackE ngine.java:592)
at com.sun.media.PlaybackEngine.doPrefetch(PlaybackEn gine.java:547)
at com.sun.media.PrefetchWorkThread.process(BasicCont roller.java:1430)
at com.sun.media.StateTransitionWorkThread.run(BasicC ontroller.java:1339)

This error is reproducible and always occurs at the same point even after a reboot. Similar crashes happen with other worlds which I know to be fine.

Several of my friends are natively running Alice 2.2 in Windows 7 (32 bit) without difficulty. In fact, I have it running natively on an older laptop with no problems.

Here are the things I have tried without success:
- Rebooting.
- Downloading again and rebooting.
- Copying the entire Alice 2.2 folder which is running fine on my other Windows 7 computer.
- Running as an administrator.
- Reducing my local UAC security settings to none.
- Changing to emulation mode with XP SP2.
- Changing to emulation mode with XP SP3.

None of these things seem to do any good.

Worse, I cannot predict when Alice might open and when it might hang--it seems random.

I really have no idea what to try next. My version of Java is 1.6.0_18 if that might be the culprit.

Has anyone figured out what to do to fix these problems with Windows 7?
Any help would be very greatly appreciated.