Realplayer Stopped Working

[Meteora]

And it has something to do with Xvid which after a long frustrating time lead me here. Frankly my luck with computers recently has been very low, also. Could just be the faulty OP known as Vista.

So I'm realizing this just today, some, not all, of my videos do not open on Realplayer, and it doesn't necessarily have to do with file types, since for instance some avi files will play but not all. My operating system is Vista Home Premium.

I not only had this problem but another one where COM Surugate (the heck kinda name is that?) stops working, but a simple windows folder option fixed that...but I'm not sure what to do about realplayer. Even more stupid, when realplayer gives me a link to an ONLINE SUPPORT FORUM to find a solution to the problem, it does not even link me to one. Just the main Xvid site which has "updates" that apparenlty are no more than some zip files which, after downloading and extracting don't do anything. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to put them somehere, or find a setup in them. It doesn't tell you anything. I found nothing helpful there and no online support forum either, which baffled me.

So if anyone has any idea what I'm talking about, please help. Apparently DivX (I downloaded DivX, not Xvid, I thought they were the same anyway since it's backwards...) doesn't work so well with realplayer, or it just does something to your computer. If I've never even heard of Xvid before then why is realplayer saying Xvid is causing a problem? I downloaded DIVX, not Xvid, so unless they are the same thing I shouldn't be getting any complains about...an Xvid, which I do not have.

I posted this in the Other Software forum but realized the last post there was months ago, so I feared no one was going to see this...

[drfsupercenter]

Of course it doesn't work, it's RealPlayer!

I would start by removing RealPlayer from your computer and getting these programs:
Real Alternative
VLC Media Player

Open any RealMedia files in Media Player Classic, and I also use MPC for just about any other type of videos, like AVI, WMV, etc. VLC is also nice as it has all the codecs already so it'll play almost any AVI you throw at it without the issues... so your DivX stuff should be fine.

And if you're interested in using MPC to play all your videos, you could install ffdshow.