DivX crashes media players and explorer

[nikuki]

I don't know if this thread belongs here, I wasn't sure where to put it, sorry.

I'll start off by explaining my set up.

I have 2 machines. 1 desktop and 1 laptop. Both have identical copies of XP SP2.

Laptop plays DivX and any other media files perfectly (yay!).

However, I cannot get my desktop to like DivX files.

The first time I tried to play a DivX movie, I installed DivX 6 (The same identical copy that I have on my laptop).

Upon opening the file, Media Player crashed. Says that DivX caused the error. (I got the "Windows Media Player has caused and error and needs to close..." dialog and when I told it to send results to MS, it opened a web page that said the error was caused by DivX.)

So I attempt to play the file in DivX Player. DivX Player crashes.

Same with VLC.

I tried to delete the movie and explorer crashed!

Now every time that I even touch a DivX file, explorer crashes.

I have uninstalled DivX and now I can move, delete, copy, etc DivX files w/o issue, but obviously I can't play them...

I know that the issue is not with my video card, as I have changed cards before I uninstalled DivX, and I got the same symptoms.

It's killing me that I'm going to have to resort to burning my movies to disc just to play them, b/c my laptop hard drive is just not that big, and they don't always play so smoothly over the network.

I'm not quite sure what the issue is here, so I'm willing to answer any questions I can...

[nikuki]

Oh, I thought I should mention one more thing. Now that I've uninstalled DivX, if I try to open a DivX movie (which I did by accident cuz I forgot I can't play them) Windows Media Player just crashes.

I'm pretty sure it did that before I ever installed DivX as well.

[chrisbliss18]

Since Windows Media Player is crashing even after removing DivX, your actual problem is probably unrelated to the DivX software. This is further evidenced by the fact that VLC won't play the file since VLC uses its own codecs and not the DirectPlay ones.

What version of Windows Media Player are you running?
Will VLC run DivX movies now that you have removed DivX?
Are you sure that the file you are trying to play is good? Can you play it on your laptop?

Try a codec pack and see if that fixes your issue. The codec packs I recommend, in order or recommendation, are: Matroska Pack, Combined Community Codec Pack, and XP Codec Pack. Try one of these out. It's possible that some of your core codecs are bad and installing one of these will overwrite/gain precedence over the bad codecs.