In the past 2 weeks, I have followed the entire regime for computer system maintenance outlined here: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/DiagnoseXP.html.
My system should be quite free of spyware, malware, grayware, viruses, and everything of the like.

I am trying to play movie files (Mostly AVI files) using microsoft windows media player 10 and microsoft windows media player 11b.

The problem is: When I open some media files, the video file opens and starts trying to play, but it does not play past the very first frame. I do not believe that this is a codec problem, as I can get the same video file to play on a different media player (though I installed many codecs as attempted solutions anyway).

I encounter this problem only with certain AVI files and not others. I do not know the differences between which AVI files work and which don't.

In an attempt to remedy the problem, I installed windows media player 11b, which gave me no change in the response of the video files.

I have also downloaded and re-installed all of the codecs that were instructed to be relevant to play the particular file (XVID, DIVX, H.264, FFDSHOW). This did not work.

As a shotgun method of troubleshooting the problem, I installed a multitude of other codecs via the XP Codec pack (http://www.xpcodecpack.com/). This also did not work.

I COULD be wrong, but I believe this problem occured at the same time that I installed a new hard drive. In safe mode, I copied all of the files off of an old and dieing extended partition hard drive and pasted them to a newly purchased hard drive. I then changed the drive letters around to make it seem like nothing had ever happened, and that all of my programs would copy over and be fully functional. It worked, but not very well. I have since uninstalled and reinstalled all of the programs on that hard drive, like I should have in the first place.

As I said before, I first noticed this problem right after I made this hard drive switch. It doesn't make sense to me, since windows media player (as well as the operating system) is installed on C:, and I replaced D:, but that's the way it is.

I am NOT an expert on codecs and all that, nor will my advice be better than amateur quality. The difficulty was that windows media player had chosen to use codecs that weren't properly suited to play the file. Different media players (such as VLC media player...that's a pretty good one) didn't have that problem, because they picked much more suitable codecs to play my movies.

For me, the answer was to get rid of the problem codec completely. It may not be the most elegant solution, but I couldn't figure out how to get windows media player to use the correct codec...nor could I figure what the correct codec would be.

So, you could do my solution; you could figure out what codec windows media player is using, then uninstall that codec from your computer. Or, if you're smarter...you could set it up such that windows media player actually uses the correct codec.

regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files\CommonFiles\Ahead\DSFilter\neaudio.ax"