This is my brother's laptop, so I'm just basing this from what he says. He recently started having problems with just about everything media related on his new laptop. His entire music collection of mp3s won't play on iTunes or Windows Media Player 10, giving him an error saying something about a proxy server, or that his songs might be playing elsewhere. He's even loaded songs onto his computer since the error appeared, and the new songs give the same error. The notebook won't play DVDs either, and he was working on a project on Windows Movie Maker that won't play either. I guess all these problems are related, but I'm not familiar with Vista, and I'm unable to look at his computer myself. (He checked for viruses too, just on a whim, and it came up clean.)

Has he tried system restore? Also ask him to create another profile & try those programs from the newly created profile - does the same thing occur?

I'll have him try to create a new profile first, and then system restore if that doesn't work. Tell me, how does system restore work? I don't know if he's done anything important that system restore might undo... But thanks for the tips!

System Restore

Thanks a million. The new profile made it worse, according to him, but the system restore fixed it. He thinks it might have had something to do with his Automatic Windows Updates; the problem happened after one of those (corrupted or something, perhaps?).