Amarok 2.4.3 Quirkiness or is it Just Me?

[Brian Blater]

I just upgraded to Amarok 2.4.3 on my Ubuntu 11.04 box using the ppa
by philip5. I'm using an external MySQL database which is finally
working in 2.4.3 as I couldn't get it to connect to the db in earlier
releases (a reported problem from what I saw). I've got the following
issues that I can't seem to get working. Not sure if I just haven't
configured things correctly or what.

1. I can't seem to get the lyrics plugin to work. It just shows a "Fetch Error".
2. The wikipedia artist info isn't working either. I just get
"Wikipedia: unable to retrieve wikipedia information
http://en.wikipedia.org"
3. Because of the two problems above I went to "configure amarok" and
clicked on Scripts. The only items selected at this time are
Lyricwiki, Cool Streams and Librivox.org. If I click on Manage Scripts
I get an empty dialogue box and an error at the bottom "loading of
providers from file: http://download.kde.org/providers.xml failed. I
can browse to the file just fine.
4. I also can't get the Cover Manager to find any covers for the
albums that don't have covers at this time. I will go through fetching
the covers, but everything is reported as "failed."
5. I have some playlists in M3U format. How can I import them? I've
tried adding the playlist directory to the amarok library and it finds
the m3u, but if I update the tag of the file, rating for example, the
track in amarok does not recognize the change. I don't really want to
go through and completely recreate all the playlists.

I've done some Google searches and that has not provided any working
solutions to the above problems. I'm hoping someone else has seen
these problems and knows of a fix or a change to my configuration I
need to supply.

Thank you for your help.
Brian