[Nx]

Now I have no idea as to why I installed p7zip for... but both don't even have executables to start or something? Am I just installing libraries?

Whatever I did to my install, I can extract the files out but I can't actually open the archive itself to see the contents beforehand (i.e. like in Windows using WinRAR or 7zip).

Ah well.

The application you are probably using (if you installed Ubuntu with Gnome) is Gnome's archive manager, called file-roller. File-roller is just a frontend to several small utilities like unrar, tar, p7zip, etc. so if you install 7zip, you're not actually installing a gui application that can handle a ton of formats like on Windows, just a small utility that can extract (and in the case of p7zip, compress) 7z archives. If you can extract files (I'm assuming you mean right click extract in the file manager), you should be able to open them in file-roller.

[asyikarea51]

I can right-click and extract, but double-clicking to open with the archive manager doesn't work (I get errors on the rar file in question not meeting ISO standard or somesuch).

No, not Gnome. I'm using Xfce (if that makes any sense... those things are desktop environments, right?).

Back to troubleshooting sound. Getting constant choppy clicks while playing videos in VLC... click click click click

[S-99]

Try setting your sound system to alsa or oss. Alsa because it's not old, being maintained, and is superior to oss. See if that fixes the problerm. If that don't work, see if making it alsa will do the trick. Also, vlc is harder to use under linux compared to windows.

[achtung]

I've always found OSS to actually sound better than ALSA on most cards.  The latest version that is.