None of my Movies Play Correctly

[rplant]

Recently, all of my movies (mpg's, avi's, rm's, and mov's alike) have been playing at unbearbly low quality. They are much more pixelated and display with distorted colors. I know the problem is not the movie files themselves; they work fine on other computers. I'm pretty sure the problem isn't codec's either, because movie files that used to play correctly have simply stopped working properly in the past three weeks. I tried the latest drivers for my video card, which did nothing to fix my problem. I even tried older versions of drivers... still nothing. Another (possibly associated) probelm I have is that none of my icons display properly on my desktop... they all seem low color and grainy for some reason. I worked with various desktop settings, trying different resolutions with different color depths. None of this has helped any. Strangely, games work fine--no color distortion whatsoever. And other aspects of the desktop (besides icons) are also undistorted. Any help would be greatly appreciated as it is hard to get started making my own movies/converting my movies to VCD when it is impossible to gauge quality. Thanks in advance.

[KingJohn]

Perhaps you should un-install your graphic card drivers, re-boot and set up a standard SVGA graphic card.

Once you have done that and it looks OK, proceed to re-install your updated drivers drivers.

Have you tried advanced settings for your card ?

[rplant]

I fiddled with all the advanced graphics/display settings, but I never tried a clean install of my drivers. That sounds like a great idea. I'll try that asap, thanks.