Hi everyone, I have a problem where WMV files are causing my computer to completely crash. Opening a WMV file and viewing it works fine but if I want to skip to any point in the video, my screen instantly goes black and then reboots. This happens in any media player. I've just reinstalled Windows XP about 2 weeks ago and I've configured my system as I have always done with all the latest updates. Mind you, I went with a different set of codecs then I usually do. Instead of installing a mega pack of codecs, I just installed Xvid, DivX and ffdshow. I didn't really do a series of tests to pin point the problem in fearing further damage to my system. I believe it is a hardware issue (getting pretty old now & my motherboard has just about had it) but thought I'd post here to see if anyone else had experienced this problem. Specs: Windows XP SP3 MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum AMD Athlon64 3200+ ATI Radeon X800XL Creative X-Fi Fatality 2GB Cosair PC3200 DDR RAM. Thanks! :)

Does this happen with ALL .wmv files? some other bloke...

Yes, all WMV files.

I asked because I had just had "exactly" the same issue but only on certain files. It was cured by revamping them with a freebie called "Super File Converter" (wmv to wmv). Somehow I think this is more likely to be a software issue than hardware. You could try this little freebie: http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ I think it might cover wmv files too, and if so it tells you immediately what codec you need. There are other similar programs around. some other bloke...