A week ago I suffered a huge self-induced PC crash -- one tweak too many, probably. Most of my stuff is back and running fine, thanks to a clean install of XP Home. But the problem that started the tweaking plus a new one are still with me.

Two games I have recently had great difficulty in even opening, much less running. Unless I repeatedly whacked the left mouse key on opening, the screen would turn black, the cursor would leap into the top lefthand corner, and it took some fiddling to get out of this.

Today I still have the same problem, plus Windows Media Player 11, which was working perfectly before the crash, is lousy on video. I reinstalled it yesterday, and it looks and runs fine for music, but all video, no matter what kind, is impossible to see. Sound good, picture not.

Figuring codecs, I downloaded and installed the K-Lite Codec pack today -- nothing changed.

Help???

Hey!

Check your hardware and devices. Could be a driver problem. Or reinstall the driver. I have had a similar issue and installing the driver again worked.

If you need a walkthrough let me know.

T

Having just barely survived a crash, I find I actually do need a walkthrough -- cowardice rears its ugly head. Thanks for the offer.

You'll find that you didn't just barely survive. You'd have to do quite a bit more than that to permanently bust your PC. Now what I want you to do as per tfox5150's advice is to go to DriverAgent and run a free scan. Please post back with the names of any devices shown with a red X beside their name.

Next, I'd like you to go to Run in your start menu and type C:\WINDOWS\Minidump. Click go and attach any files in that folder to your next post. I'll take a peek at it, but I may also call in another techie to make sure I make the correct diagnosis.

AFTER you post back with the contents of that folder, I would like you to go to the Prework page and follow the instructions. Post back with everything that is necessary.

Windows Media Player 11 may or may not be connected. Personally, it has wrought havoc on my PC, and the upgrades it puts to Movie Maker and such, many filetypes are just incompatible with the programs I use regularly. *audible sigh*

Anyway, I would also like to know if your PC is slow, and for possible future reference, whether your mouse and keyboard use USB or if they use PS/2 (which are the round plugs). If you're using USB I would like to know if your computer has PS/2 ports on it. This is not important at the moment but may be in the near future of this case.