System reboots when closing video playback

[Xesdeeni]

I've been wrestling with this problem for a very long time. Whenever I playback some video files, after I exit the program, the system reboots. The program doesn't matter, it happens with several including Media Player, so I'm pretty sure there is a problem with one of my installed drivers. The system is a Windows 2000 machine with SP2 installed. Unfortunately, I don't have the option of stripping the system down and starting over.

I've tried going through the drivers including uninstalling everything I could find. I've installed loads of different drivers over the years on this machine, so I'm sure things are a bit messy.

Initially, I got the crash any time I played an MPEG-2 file. MPEG-1 files were OK. I suspected the MPEG-2 drivers, so I began uninstalling and stripping things down (including manual cleaning of the registry) until I couldn't play MPEG-2 files at all any more. I figured this would handle it. But upon re-installation, the reboot returned.

So I stripped them out again. This most recent time, I've installed PowerDVD. Previously, DVDs would play and then I'd reboot after closing PowerDVD. But now that isn't the case. I thought I had it licked. But then I had a crash playing an AVI file!

Anyway, I have some HD transport streams I want to play and PowerDVD wouldn't do it. So I installed Elecard. That plays TSs fine, but I crash after I exit.

I've also tried using Graphedit to create a flowgraph. I have crashed Graphedit, and once I was able to reboot the machine. But uninstalling the filters I used didn't help.

I've about decided that the video decoder isn't really the culprit. I guess that leaves the demux or audio decoder. But neither of those explains the AVI crash.

I'm not sure which direction to go or what tools to use. Can someone give me some basic advice on what I should try?

Xesdeeni

[ppera2]

Unfortunatelly this is very common problem with all Windows versions.
But removing trouble is much harder in 2K/XP. Maybe because of less experience, but maybe because of different driver handling.

I have some issues with drivers in XP, and simple can't remove all collected trash. Searching registry sometimes helps - if you know what to search, but there is lot of records which contents only numbers, so you simple don't know what is for what.

Reinstall from zero is in many cases only, and even simplest solution. I know that it is big problem, to keep all what is set up etc. I will need to do it sooner or later, just wait some less busy period :mad: