Totem shows a 2nd window for animations?

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

I'm using Ubuntu that is totally up-to-date.  Totem opens a title-less second 
window for displaying animations.  Why is it not showing the movie in the 
content view of the Totem window?

When I look at a Flash animation I have saved on my hard drive, I hear it (it's 
a bit choppy, which is odd considering I'm running Ubuntu on a dual 500MHz 
Pentium III system with 1GB RAM, a speedy system with plenty of RAM), but I see 
an odd rendering of the Flash animation in this secondary window.  The movie is 
drawn so that virtually each line of the rendered bitmap is drawn to the right 
of the one before it.  The movie colors are all wrong.

When I view an Ogg Theora movie, I hear the Vorbis soundtrack but I see the 
second window with a tiny green square in it and I don't see the animation at all.

In order to get Totem to play the sound at all, I had to run 
gstreamer-properties from a shell and set the audio output to ALSA (I believe 
this has already been addressed and will be fixed for Warty or some subsequent 
release).  Then I opened Theora in a normal way (for command-line users, that 
is): "theora kingintro.swf".  kingintro.swf came from homestarrunner.com.

Has anyone else seen this problem?
Any advice or tips?
Any information you need from my machine to better understand what's going on?