OK bear with me here, because I'm not sure what this error is called or how exactly to describe this... but I've noticed that, whenever I play a video (be it AVI or MKV or MP4, or XVID, or DIVX, or x264) I see some strange artifacts in the shadowy/dark areas of the video. Take this shot for example, as you can see, part of his face is in shadow, but you can still see into the shadow area right? Some part(s) of the face are still visible, however, when I actually play the thing, that entire area becomes obscured and forms this ink-blotched area, wherein that part of his face just looks like a big deep blue blob. I thought this was maybe a problem with the persons encoding said files, and that it was some sort of a compression artifact but then I don't have this problem when I playback the video in VirtualDub. It only happens if I use any normal player (I've tried Media Player Classic Home Cinema, with K-Lite Codec Pack installed, and VLC and KMPlayer) I can always see these artifacts. Right now, I was trying to watch this old b&w film but all the shadows that the actors cast, and any other dark areas there are, are forming these inky blotches and it's annoying and distracting.

I'm using an 18.5 inch widescreen LED monitor but I am not so sure it is a problem with that, is it? I do not have a video card, just this "Intel (R) Graphics Media Accelerator Driver," and a 2 GB RAM, I'm using Windows XP Pro SP3.