Okay, I made sure the volume settings were in order, restarted the application, and now everything is working perfectly well: no slow start-up, no indefinite processing, and the volume plays as expected.
To that end, I want to sincerely thank you for your help and patience with this problem. Without your help, I don't know what I would've done, so I'm glad you were able and willing to help me despite the difficulty of the issue and my time constraints. You've been immensely helpful and I don't think I could have recovered this 3-month project without you, so thank you!
