A very irritating/weird problem

[old.user4556]

Right,

Since this could be more than one area of problem, i'm sticking it in the general for the time being.

I'm not sure if i have a hardware, software, codec, firefox, windows media player or some other issue, but it's driving me crackers.

Basically, whenever I have a firefox window open (or firefox.exe running in the task manager, including the download dialog) and open up a media file that loads in windows media player; my PC goes into a "quarter screen" or 640*480 looking display mode and the whole PC freezes up. The PC does eventually unfreeze and play about half a second of video before locking up again. I then need to hammer the ALT+F4 key until the PC unfreezes and closes down the windows media player window.

However, the screen still sits in this "quarter screen" mode until I kill all the firefox windows/processes when it eventually goes back to full screen.

Sometimes (not always), i'm lumbered with the following error once i close all firefox windows:

Can anyone shed any light on what might be causing this problem?

 

[Tom]

I have suffered recently from almost exactly the same problem.

I reckon its a codec issue, but just out of curiosity try disabling all thumbnail views as that works for me. As soon as XP tries to thumbnail certain video files explorer will crash.

 

[old.user4556]

It's worth noting it doesn't always do this - there must be a set of conditions that cause this to happen.