the new version of asf-tools 3.1 http://www.geocities.com/myasftools/ along with installing win media encoder http://download.microsoft.com/download/winmediatech40/wmenc71/7.1/W98NT42KMe/EN-US/wmencoder71.exe allows you to easily re-encode any WMV1 or WMV2 (.wmv) file to MP43 (.asf) format and then convert that .asf MP43 to .avi !!!

problems have been solved!