Windows Media Player will not play videos that were fine yesterday

[gredhead]

I have on old system I installed windows 7 on. Due to jerky video in WMP, I installed a Geforce 6200 and latest drivers. Everything has been fine for many months, but today I get error messages from WMP when I try to play video files that played fine yesterday. Usually it says "WMP cannot play this video because there is a problem with your video card."

Just for grins, I tried downloading, installing VLC, and it has a black screen too when trying to play video files.

Any ideas?

 

[notty22]

Give this forum post a shot.

[Fixed] Windows 7 Media Player Errors With Fix WMP

Fix WMP is a free utility by The Windows Club, this will re-register all the dll files which are needed for Windows Media Player to work properly. This simple means that your Windows Media Player will become just like freshly installed copy of Windows Media Player and this will fix the errors of Windows Media Player.
This is a very small and simple utility with no fancy options, just one simple click and the problem gets fixed.

 

[gredhead]

I remembered a great utility from years ago (gspot) and used it to look at the codecs for the files that won't play - wmv3. But gspot says the codex status is "undetermined" - never seen that before.

Went to page recommended in previous post, tried the manual reset of WMP with WMP configuration diagnostic - got "an error occurred" message.

ran fix WMP, said all dll's re-registered.

WMP config diag still says an error occurred.

still can't view the video files.

How can things get so screwed up when the files play one night, don't touch the computer, and next morning they won't play? And I thought I liked win 7.

 

[gredhead]

I thought about uninstalling wmp, then re-installing. Looks like you can't just download wmp for win 7, so I downloaded the media feature pack that includes wmp that is intended for the versions of win 7 that did not originally include wmp.

Is this the next logical step, or should I try something else first? It doesn't seem logical that I would need to install codecs, when the files in question are ms's own wmv format.