No audio in several programs

I am attempting to clean off my hard rive of several AVI files, here's the problem I have been attempting to use Pinnacle Studio 9, very unstable program (locks up alot, anyway...). When I am screening the clips, there is no audio on certain files, and no audio on finished product. I tried gspot and it stated that i had the appropriate codecs, plus they have audio on media player. I used Virtualdub to convert to an AVI with the same results.GSPot stated that the file is a mpeg 1 layer 3 audio and that i have the codecs to play. i even tried tmpgenc and wmm, same results. What am i doing wrong?