First off, the whole point of the Media vp is to prevent you from having to manually place everything in the correct directory. However, it should still work if you extracted everything.
Secondly, if you've got the sparky_hi_fs2.vp in your root directory it should get used. If it is there and not picking up, then you've got a legitimate bug. However, make sure that you've first chosen an executable as well (as in browsed to probably FS_open_r.exe with the "browse" button on the top of the launcher) and that the Launcher is in the FS2 root directory. Otherwise, I don't know what to tell you, other than posting your system stats may be helpful.