2 areas of letterboxing when watching dvds on my laptop

[get_thrashed]

When i watch a widescreen dvd on my laptop, there appears to be two different "areas" of letterboxing. There is the standard black area you would always see when watching widescreen on a 4:3 display. But, there is also a smaller area above and below the actual movie image that is a dark grey. These grey bars are about equal to the letterboxing you would see when watching a movie with an aspect ratio greater than 1.78:1 on a 16X9 display. This is especially strange since the display on my laptop is 4:3. The actual video doesn't look stretched or distorted and is centered properly on the screen, there are just these extra grey areas at the top and bottom. I am using WinDVD, but i tried other players and the effect remains. Any way i can fix this?

[flaninacupboard]

not really, if you examine the actual files on the DVD you'll find they have tiny black bars (if it's a 1.85:1 movie) or small black bars (if it's a 2.35:1 movie) although increasingly 1.77:1 is subsituted for 1.85:1 so no bars are present.
The only thing you can do is turn your brightness setting down a notch until both sets of bars are the same level.