Black flash before a movie runs when you view a PowerPoint presentation in Internet Explorer

When you create a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint and view the presentation as a Web page in Microsoft Internet Explorer, any slide that contains an inserted movie flashes a black screen for about one second before the movie starts to play.

If you click to clear the Play animations check box on the Advanced tab in the Internet Options dialog box in Internet Explorer (click Internet Options on the Tools menu), the slide with the inserted movie still flashes black before the slide appears, but now for only about a half-second.

This behavior occurs because Internet Explorer loads the entire movie into a cache before it starts to play the movie. The screen turns black momentarily while the movie is loaded into the cache.

Even if Internet Explorer does not play the movie, it still loads the movie into the cache.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

For more information about other differences between a PowerPoint presentation and a presentation viewed as a Web page, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: