Okay...after uninstallation of Canola, Canola tuning, MPlayer
and running Canola-clean-up TWICE, I rebooted, installed Canola and voila it ran!

Then I loaded Canola tuning, ran the album covers...okay.
But when I ran video thumbnails it complained that I had to install the "Evil" mplayer.

So I installed mplayer and that's when everything stopped working again.

Same problem as before...when I invoke Canola from menu, it says "Loading" then n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

This implicates the "Evil" mplayer, don't-you-think?