Thank you for the video. Interestingly, when the PPT is re-opened, the switch characters were still /X, but the slashes in the program path all changed from \ to /.

I see that in my first analysis, I noticed that both the program and switch characters were the same and thus I assumed that the problem was still re-occurring. But in fact what happened was that the program slash characters changed and the switch characters did not. Thus I am able to successfully use the action to launch the program.

Thank you for your assistance, John!