Yesterday when my daughter tried to play a dvd the sound and video were all jerky, I know it was working ok up to about 2 weeks ago, and as far as I know i have not changed any settings. One thing I did notice was that there was an icon for ffdshow on the far right of the taskbar, I do not remember installing this and it would not allow me to close it. When i now put a disc in the drive the listing under my computer just stays as DVD-RW Drive (D:) whereas it used to change to show what disc was in there and I cannot get the drive to auto play at all, even to get audio cd's to play i have to clock on the drive in my computer and click on the track I want to play. Any help and suggestions appreciated. I am running xp home sp2 on an evesham xp1800 pc with 768Mb ram and the drive is a TSST corp TS-H552U DVD-RW. I have followed the troubleshooting guide, I have run nero drive test, I have uninstalled and re-installed the device but it is still the same. I can play video that is on my hard drive with no problems.

My opinion about ffdshow is that some movie DVDs ask if you want to install there software to view the movie. Apparently your daughter installed it. Searching the web for ffdshow says at one website-- "ffdshow is a super-fast DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies and supports subtitles as well. If you ever want to watch movies, get this! ... and MMX), etc. FFDSHOW is released as an open source software ..." Try looking for anything new in Add/Remove Programs, and remove the program.

As for the jerky DVD playback in Windows, CLICK ME to read the whys and what you can do to overcome it. i_XpUser

As for AutoPlay, or Autorun-- The AutoRun feature or the AutoPlay feature does not work when you insert a CD-ROM in the drive http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330135

I have checked to see if DMA is enabled and it is, everything has been ok for at least a year, from when I upgraded to the current dvd drive, until yesterday. Auto play will not work with any type of disc, audio, dvd, blank or cd rom, even though it is set in properties, the fact that the description in my computer doesn't change worries me, it always did before.

Correction, when I checked for DMA, I'm sure all of the settings said current mode was set to ultra DMA but after asking elsewhere as well and being fed up I went back into device manager and found that one was set to PIO. Many thanks to XpUser, followed your link and uninstalled the IDE, re-booted and let XP re configure, all seems to be well now. Any ideas as to what might have caused this setting to go wrong?