All Video playback crashes PC

[d0z3y]

Hi
I have a Pentium 3.2 with a Radeon 9600 mobile and XP Pro. Iusually use Zoomplayer for watching divx etc. Recently I installed a game (Soldiers: Heroes of WW2) which has some wmv movies as part of the into. After a couple of frames of playback the picture would freeze and the sound would continue.

I have since tried playing all sorts of video - divx, mpeg, xvid, wmv etc. in different players including zoomplayer and windows media player. Every time I get a couple of frames then the application freezes. If I kill that app, the whole PC crashes 5 seconds later.

If I start a second instance of the windows media player, it will then play the video without a problem (until I kill the crashed instance).

I have tried uninstalling and then reinstalling all the media players, all the codecs, windows media player, radeon drivers, directx and nothing fixes the problem.

I think it may be a problem with directshow but am not sure how to confirm or fix this.

After spending 2 weeks trying to fix this, I am now desperate!

d0z3y

[setarip]

If your O/S is Windows XP, perform a simple "system restore" to the latest date at which "things were working properly"...

[d0z3y]

thanks - I looked at that but did not have a restore point earlier enough. Pbly because I have been uninstalling and reinstalling so much stuff to try and get this working - should have tried that at the beginning.