Broken_Wing 0 Newbie Poster

Augh, okay ... to start everything off, I have Windows XP and my computer is rather old (almost ten years). I'm not too bad with finding my way around programs and such, but i'm really not that computer literate when it comes to repairing things and doing the more advanced stuff. I already had this problem once, and I can't remember exactly how I fixed it. It was a while back when I fixed it, so ...

When it all started, I had gotten my computer back from the guy who fixes our computers, and I had never had this problem before ... he upgraded my computer to Windows XP, and got rid of spyware on my computer and updated everything (as well as put some more memory on it).

When I went to play a video file in windows media player (I had just downloaded 10), it wouldn't play it right. Either the video screen would become this dark purple color, or it would have a pixilated version of one of the top corners of the video that was trying to play ... eventually, after searching online for a while, I found a website that helped me explain the problem. It was something about having to go into the options, then the performance tab, and going to the advanced properties, and changing the rendering settings. After that, it played the video files perfectly.

Now, today I was playing an .AVI file on my windows media player, and it wasn't making any sound ... so I downloaded a codec pack, and tried to play it again ... and it acted like I had just re-installed WMP 10, and re-set all of my options to the default, including what I had done to the rendering ... so of course, it went back to make the wierd purple screen, or doing that strange pixilated thing ... for the past five hours i've been trying to remember what exactly I did, but i've searched for a while now online and i've not been able to find anything that's helped ... I've been messing with the settings (Tools, then options, then performance, then advanced), and it's still not working ... and i'm really wanting to play this video file @.@;

(By the way, even though in WMP it worked after the first time I had fixed it, it still did the same thing in Real Player and in Windows Movie Maker)

I've tried making the video 100%, but it just makes the distorted or purple image bigger. And i've tired turning off the video acceleration, and it does nothing. I've looked aaaaaall over the web, and all I can't find is how to fix the streaming video ... this is NOT a web based video ... it has been downloaded onto my computer.

If someone can help me, i'd really, really, really appreciate it ...