where's my blue screen of death?? (frequent system crash)

[josh]

I have never had a big problem with Windows 2000 before,
and even in the past when I have had problems that crash
the system, I at least am given a clue via the Blue Screen
what may be the problem.

As of a few weeks ago, my system tends to hang during many
different types of activities, but most often during video
playback or media playback of most kinds. My monitor will
make the noise that it makes when it is changing
resolutions (that little *ping*) and the screen will go
completely black with almost invisible gray blocks towards
the bottom of the screen. I assume that this black screen
is a distorted version of what should be the "blue screen
of death," but is not displaying properly for some reason.

My system is virus and worm-free as far as Norton is
concerned, my disks are as healthy as one can make them,
and I do not have any other types of hardware problems.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

One strange clue...
If I am playing a CD, it will continue playing until I
reset or shut down the system manually.

Thanks! Please email me if you are able to.
- Josh

 

[_ V -]

Perhaps the codec for your media file has conflicts with
your video driver? I've seen this with an older Win98se
setup when trying to play an AVI file that was encoded
with something called XviD. It required a new (i.e. Beta
version) of the codec. After that it played fine.

 

[Josh]

That sounds logical.

I think that might be the problem, but it may not be the
whole problem... I'm not totally sure.

One of the funny other symptoms is that anything encoded
with a Windows Media codec (most AVI + WMV + ASF type
files) will not play in Media Player, but will play in
Winamp. In Media Player (or its plugin in IE), the video
will show the first frame, and then freeze. The audio will
play but the video remains frozen on a blank screen or the
first frame.

- Josh