I'm not especially familiar with Windows ME but I know in XP (according to my brother, & another thread) you can backdate the system's prefs to restore how things were at that time. I'll have to get back to you (fundamentally I'm a Mac person - this might be out of my depth - I've never owned a pc, although I've taken one apart & rebuilt it from scratch as part of a uni course, it had nothing to do with softw troubleshooting.) Obviously you don't think much of the other suggestions, but ...have you tried any other movies with your media players as I suggested? At least make sure there's nothing corrupted in the apps or their prefs for your media players or sys. I guess we should ascertain whether this is a LW issue or not! It's certainly a mystery. Hopefully a more experienced pc person will add something.