WMP 9 and DVD Software

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Very strange problem. Just recovered from a major PC meltdown and am back up and running. My DVD software (WinDVD) was running fine and I was transcoding and burning as usual.

Problem -
Made some changes to my system. Installed Media Player 9, installed AVI Synth, installed windows updates. Now, WinDVD won't work. Just loads in the background as a process and never opens.

The strange part -
Uninstalled, reinstalled, uninstalled WMP9 & AVI Synth, tried other DVD software, rebooted a billion times, tried various ASPI drivers and NO dvd software will play a disk on my machine. PowerDVD -> errors. WinDVD -> nothing. MicroDVD -> Opens, won't play DVD.

I'm going NUTS. Does anyone have any clue what could possibly be going on here? I am totally at a loss as to why this is happening. Thanks in advance.

[jrg]

never seen that, but sometimes if you have a USB card reader connected it can mess up your optical drives or the more specifically DVD/CD programs.

Nero would not work when i had a crappy media card reader plugged in. it would just run in the background.

I was thinking of installing WMP9 and looking for threads on here. Not so sure i want to go through with it now.

good luck

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As an update to this, I installed a parallel copy of Win2K with no patches and PowerDVD will work, but still WinDVD will not work at all. I won't even pull up the GUI. VERY strange.