This sounds familiar, but I can't for the life of me remember what is going on. If I drop these vob's into Powerdvd, they play but the audio is missing. If you display "info", in the top right corner it says "audio: not available" Does this ring a bells with anybody ? The problem only occurs with vob's that have ac3 audio.
I resolved it by reinstalling Powerdvd. The symptoms were quite odd; I extracted the ac3 audio from the vob file and opened the ac3 in Powerdvd. It played fine. But to play the vob from which the audio was extracted would play the video only. Very curious.