Subtitles (.srt) stopped working halfway thru (.avi) series…

[viewer3403512]

I'm in the midst of watching the 15-part series ("Brigada", from Russia) with .avi and .srt subtitle files, the first four episodes were fine but now the subtitles won't load.

I've tried everything that I could think of: setting the preferences to detect automatically and opening at the same time, also deselecting that preference and choosing the .srt manually, dropping both on icon simultaneously, and so on.

There doesn't appear to be any difference between any of the later .srt files from the earlier ones, and they all came from the same source. I've also tried throwing out the VLC preferences. I did not change versions of VLC at any point (0.8.6a). Thanks