Audio trouble and general dissatisfaction

This year we upgraded from Studio '09 to Studio '13.  When opening a PowerPoint presentation with old Articulate recorded audio in it,  Articulate naturally wants to upgrade the file.  When it does this however, it erases the old audio.

After it upgrades, the slides still change with timing like there's audio there, but no audio.

Is there any way to extract the old audio from the backup file Articulate creates without it being upgraded?  This is something that happens only sometimes, not every time.  

I'm afraid to open old files and risk that my staff will have to take time out of their busy schedules to re-record an entire presentation, instead of just re-recording a slide or two like we planned.

We are on a shared network, but I've been recording on my laptop and saving to my hard drive.  All of our old presentations are on the network, so I've been copying them to my hard drive before trying any of this. 

Most people are on shared networks these days.  Is this something Articulate is going to adapt to in the future?  I would have appreciated a warning before purchasing the upgrade that it doesn't function well on a network.

Also, I had a staff member record the other day, and save and close the presentation, and none of the audio he'd recorded the day before was there the next day when he wanted to record again.  As you can imagine, this was frustrating for him to realize he'd wasted hours of work day.

We have had so many bugs with Articulate.  It's been shutting down, and not responding, and deleting our audio.

I'm also embarrassed, because when we wanted to update our webinars I had to convince my manager to spend the money to upgrade to Articulate '13.  It's not turning out to be the best choice.

Sorry for being that customer, but I'm at my wits end with this software, and any help besides re-directing me to another discussion would be appreciated.