Software Cinemaster 99 has stopped playing DVDs

[MSquared]

Software Cinemaster suddenly announced that the (new) DVD we were about to play was not the correct region, and did we wish to change region. We selected Yes (still having 5 lives left), and now it won't play anything, new or old. The control panel comes up, but it won't display any track info, or start playing anything.

The region story. We are in the UK, and all our DVDs (past and present) are Region 2, so we've no idea why it even asked us about a change. It actually told us we needed to change to region 2, which we were presumably already using. We've downloaded DVDGenie, which confirms that all our disks are region 2, and used DVD genie to reset the player to region 2, in case it is any doubt! This also claims to give us back our 5 lives for resetting regions.

We've done nothing to the PC since we last played a (region 2) DVD successfully, except load and (try to) run Norton Ghost (but that's another story, and isn't an obvious candidate for screwing up the DVD playback).

The DVD drive is a CD/DVD combo, and CDs work fine.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on? Has the DVD component of the drive died, or is this likely to be a software problem?

Thanks in anticipation.

[setarip]

Try installing and using a different software DVD player (e.g. demo version of WinDVD). Its behavior should help you narrow the possible range of causes of your problem...

[MSquared]

Thanks. I'll try that and let you know.

Thinking it through, I guess the hardware must be OK, since it happily reads data from non-movie files on DVDs (e.g. the content of magazine cover disks on DVD). It just won't play back anything which needs the software DVD player.