Unknown (to me), please name this problem

[khaboh]

On my XP Home machine, I'm having a problem that mostly is about me not being able to describe it in a few words, which makes FAQ and google searches pretty hard. It seems to be similar to an overscanning problem, but it's on almost all videos of various formats, none subtitled, and zooming out doesn't help.

It's as if the player (I've tried several) is simply not displaying the top and right, oh, 15% or so of the video. While trying to fix it I've noticed that if/when I get multiple players to access the same file at once, for some strange reason one of them will magically get it right. I've tried un/re-installing codecs and players several times. To clarify - imagine the video blown up about 15%, without the viewing pane blown up to match, and the X,Y zero-point is at the lower left corner of the viewing pane.

The only thing I can think of is that the card has dual outs (vga and dvi on the Geforce FX 5200), and the monitor has dual ins (also vga and dvi, on a gateway 900w HD flat panel). I am NOT currently using any sort of dual-display options, but in the past when I have I've noticed that sometimes video playback has it's own ideas about which monitor to use and whether to go fullscreen. Perhaps somewhere in the process it's still trying to use the 'other' display, even though it's disabled in the settings?

So, could someone at least point me toward what this problem might be called, something that can be used as a decent search term for google or FAQs? Thanks much!!

[khaboh]

Argh,I'm an idiot, but perhaps myidocy might help someone else in the future.

Of course posting about it made me go fiddle some more, and of course that made me start asking out-of-box questions. I ended up in the video overlay settings, which I never touch, and so never checked.

Something/somehow, whatever, had altered my overlay settings to zoom in on the lower left corner. All fixed now. I guess I still have one nagging question: What software might possibly have accessed my overlay settings, and why? I've always avoided messing with them myself, I can't fathom why they were changed at all.

Thanks again!