Windows Media Player Problems (Blank Green)

[SunYatSen]

I am running a nearly stock Gateway 812GM Media Center desktop from Circuit City. It runs on Window XP Media Center Edition w/ Service Pack 2. It has an Athlon 3200+ 2.2 gh processor and Nvidia GeForce FX 5200. It came with half a gig of ram, but I upgraded it to a full gig.

My problem is this: Windows Media Player doesn't correctly play wmv files, despite the fact that this is a MEDIA CENTER desktop. The problem usually manifests itself like this: after a few seconds, the movie will switch to a blank green screen (if it makes a difference, imagine the viewable image is split into two triangles, lower left and upper right; the lower left triangle turns green first, followed by the upper right). The sound becomes choppy, but eventually plays smoothly with a blank green screen for the image. This seems to happen most frequently when playing wmvs I've downloaded. It happens infrequently when streaming movies.

I have disabled hardware acceleration, YUV flipping, RGB flipping, and use video mixing renderer, and reduced digital video to smallest. I uninstalled all my codecs and reinstalled only official Windows Media Player ones. I have the newest Nvidia drivers. Short of a completely fresh install (I have some programs with limited unlock codes), does anyone have any further suggestions?

[smth]

Well, maybe the problem is in your video card itself? How does it respond to high quality 3D games for example?
Try to test it on 3DMark®05.

[SunYatSen]

Originally Posted by smth

Well, maybe the problem is in your video card itself? How does it respond to high quality 3D games for example?
Try to test it on 3DMark®05.

In Far Cry, I get about 40-50 fps outdoors and 70-80 indoors. In Half-Life 2 (and CS:S), I get 25-35.
My 3DMark Score was 195, and the CPU score was 1904.

[Xanex]

Green screens washouts useually indicate a bad codec problem. Try installing a codec pack. I reccomend the kazaa lite mega codec pack, select all codecs except the 3ivx ones. If you want the 3ivx ones, make sure you run the config utility to check the box taht says prevent 3ivx from decoding xvid content.

a quick search on google will lead you to the codec pack, give this a try,

also update your nvidia drivers

[SunYatSen]

Originally Posted by Xanex

Green screens washouts useually indicate a bad codec problem. Try installing a codec pack. I reccomend the kazaa lite mega codec pack, select all codecs except the 3ivx ones. If you want the 3ivx ones, make sure you run the config utility to check the box taht says prevent 3ivx from decoding xvid content.

a quick search on google will lead you to the codec pack, give this a try,

also update your nvidia drivers

Excellent. The codec pack seems to have worked, although it may be Media Player Classic (which also installed) which did the trick.
Interestingly, Nvidia's link to Media Center drivers is broken.