have you edited the project directory?? I guess you know each project needs to be set and created from the project editor so the various bits of data are stored in their correct folders.

have you been playing around with the playback parameters. When I started in Maya I thought the thing was broken but every time it was me and the more i tried to correct it the more I made it worse, god knows how many times I repaired it unnessasarily and how many times I created a new 'prefs' folder. When you do any tuts read every line and try not to preempt the text. A left click or a right click, order of selection, stuff like that is extremely important.