this started happening recently and i have no idea whats causing it or
how to fix it...

ill starts watching any type of a movie on my comp mpg avi or even dvds
and as far as i can tell the video will sometimes randomly freeze. From
what ive noticed the longer i watch something the more frequent the
video freezing will be, but one time I even had it freeze 1 second after the movie started playing. Once its stuck there is nothing i can do other
then hit the reset button, the mouse wount move and keyboard doesnt
respond ie: no hdd activity what so ever. Ive tried to update the
video and audio codecs and even my video card drivers but so far none
of those have solved the problem. Unfortunately windows xp doesnt give me any error message so i cant tell whats wrong, but it must be something that is common in playing any type of a video file cuz as far as i know .avi files and DVDs dont have much in common especially since i play them on different software. For dvds i use Power DVD xp and for other file i use Windows Media Player 9, and Divx Alpha Player 2.1 (i freezes with all of them).