Well after months of hunting the killer OpenAL bug it looks like we’ve got it cornered. It ain’t dead yet, but we’ve narrowed it down and have what we hope is an acceptable workaround until we’ve stamped it out for good.
Turns out, for whatever reason, the nVidia OpenAL drivers (available from the Creative OpenAL http site) will crash if Joal.dll is in the current working directory when you launch your application. To avoid this problem, place joal.dll in some other directory than the root directory of you app. Then add that directory to the path if it isn’t already there or call -Djava.library.path={some folder that has joal.dll in it} when you launch your app.
In the machines that were exhibiting this problem, this seems to have done the trick, and eliminates the need for the end-user to reinstall OpenAL.
I’ll check the changes to the demos in shortly, in the meantime you can try it yourself and let me know if you have any more issues.
good luck!