For some reason certain video files are not playing correctly now. Any streaming video I try to play has very poor quality. It looks like the video is being played on an old computer with a 16 color display. Some stored movies are having the same problem, but not all of them. It doesn't seem to be a certain file type that is having the problem. I have avi's that work and avi's that don't. It's a strange problem and I'm probably not explaining it that well, but I would appreciate any help anyone can give.

Is this a new problem? Were things playing OK previously?

Any new hardware & or software? Updates etc. ?

Is this in Windows Media Player? Any other players?

yes the problem is new. The only recent change is that i updated the drivers for my GeForce 6800 video card. The problem happens in all my media players. Another problem that may be related is that the startup messages that used to be displayed before windows loaded are not being displayed. The first thing that comes up on the monitor when the computer is turned on is the windows welcome screen. But DVDs, games, pictures, and a few of my movie files all look fine.

Just as a test you could roll back that driver.

Also try a System Restore to before the driver.

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Does everything look good under dxdiag?

Start/Run/ dxdiag | Display

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Also not sure that this would help your problem but it is a good codec pack to have:

http://www.xpcodecpack.com/

I have a few problems that I think are all related to eachother. First of all, when my computer boots up, none of the system messages come up on the screen. The power light on my monitor is orange so it is getting no input. When the computer gets to the windows welcome screen it decides to send video to the monitor and after that my computer generally runs fine. The problems I have once the computer is running are that some video files that played fine in the past now play with very poor quality and it looks like they are being played with an 8 or 16 color pallette from back in the day. All of my games run fine though. The other problem I have is that the display will cut out while I'm playing a game and it won't come back on again. When I turn the computer off and back on again it says that my computer has recovered from a serious error. I send the error report and it tells me that the nvidia graphics driver caused my computer to crash. I have all the newest graphics drivers and windows updates. If anyone can help me with this I would appreciate it.

It might be worth trying an older driver:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html

Remembering to uninstall all Video Drivers before Installing different drivers.

Another possibility is to update the Chipset Drivers.