I don't own a blu-ray, but I've played with and watched movies on two players, in both situations there were issues with the audio being out of sync with the picture. I watched on two very compatible set ups. One was a Sony player hooked by HDMI to a Sony 1080 tv and the other was a Samsung player hooked by HDMI to a Samsung 1080 tv (in both situations 120hz was turned off). Neither set up utilized an A/V reciever so I was listening through the TV speakers.

I watched the documentary supplements on How The West Was Won and Criterion's The Third Man and both had sync issues.

Is this a common problem? What can be done?

I own Panasonic and Oppo Blu-ray players and have never experienced this problem. I know that at least on the Oppo the audio is adjustable.

Wow, conspiracy of silence. Or is this really not a known problem and I've just had uncanny bad luck?

I'm going to go with bad luck, or maybe a problem with how the TV is handling the HDMI connection.

I highly doubt a "conspiracy of silence," especially on this forum.

Personally, I have a cheap Insignia hooked up to the TV via HDMI, with sound to the receiver via optical. No audio sync problems here.

Usually optical doesn't cause sync problems, HDMI does.

This sounds to me like you were witnessing an HDMI 'handshake' issue. It's really not that big of a deal, and is actually pretty common. The best way to make sure this doesn't happen is to figure out the right order your equipment should be turned on in. In most cases it's generally accepted the order should be, I believe, TV, receiver, and then the device. It might be Receiver, TV, and then the device.

What I've actually done for the rare times my equipment decides it wants to perform some HDMI handshake crap on me, is programmed a sequence in my Harmony remote that quickly changes inputs on my receiver back and forth so an HDMI handshake can be re-negotiated, usually making the problem go away.

And if there is no reciever, I presume the correct order is device then TV. Right?

No, TV then Blu-ray player.

I had a Hitachi DVD player back in 2003 and the audio would go out sync now and then. It was never consistent and did it on both pressed discs (occasionally) and recordable discs.

I know when some people create a disc they use LPCM audio which is uncompressed audio mixed with compressed MPEG2 video and have found some machines cannot handle it. The audio would go out of sync or the picture would even skip and jump.

When it was re-recorded with Dolby Digital 2.0 compressed audio with the compressed MPEG video file it played perfectly.