Let me start by saying thanks for the suggestion! VLC does indeed play the AVIs in question. So that is huge!!! It just did not make sense that all of the AVIs I was downloading worked for weeks in many different apps(realplayer etc.) and then stopped working completely overnight.

Makes one suspicious/nervous about the health of said computer. Should I find the time maybe I will find the root cause, but then again..............

Anyway, thanks for the tip.

-cb424