Man, that would make it hard to enjoy the page! That doesn't happen for me on work or home computers, in either Explorer or Firefox, and it doesn't sound like anybody else is having that problem. Anybody got a suggestion?
Yeah, I bet you any money Dan's running Chrome; I was able to repro it there. It uses a separate audio plugin which is probably why it's behaving differently. Opera will allegedly have the same problem, but I wouldn't have firsthand knowledge, because who outside of a cellphone runs Opera?
Basically in order to get Chrome to honor the "autostart="false"" attribute you have to tell it the media type, as well. So if you add "type="audio/mpeg"" right after the autostart attribute, that should fix it. (I'm not sure if this is a bona fide bug in Chrome or if it's a thing about Chrome having a hard-on about being standards-compliant to a fault and this is something you've been getting away with all this time because IE and FF don't call you on it.)
So, for example:
<embed src="sounds/pulseeagle.mp3" autostart="false" loop="false" controller="true"
bgcolor="#80c9ff" width="300" height="42">
would become
<embed src="sounds/pulseeagle.mp3" autostart="false" type="audio/mpeg" loop="false"
controller="true" bgcolor="#80c9ff" width="300" height="42">
In your case, I would bet that a global search and replace on
autostart="false" loop="false"
for
autostart="false" type="audio/mpeg" loop="false"
would do the trick with minimal bloodshed, if whatever you're using to manage the site will allow for such a thing.
(Normally, I'd tell Dan to get a real browser, but honestly Chrome has enough market saturation at this point to be taken seriously. It's not an unreasonable gripe. Also, it seems like your audio clip code is way overbloated...I'm not sure you need both the object declaration and the embed, so maybe I'd try pulling out the embed altogether and seeing what happens. Embed has pretty much been deprecated and replaced by Object.)