Playing two DivX movies crashes Powerpoint2003 on WinXP?

[Guest]

Has anyone else encountered the following problem:

* I have Powerpoint2003 installed on my Win XP SP2 laptop.

* I have two movies that I have encoded with DivX5 . They will
play just fine in mplay32.

* Inserting them into my presentation is no problem, but if I
try to play them from within powerpoint (or slideshow) only
one will play fine. The instant I try to play the second movie,
Powerpoint will crash. In fact, this happens even if I just try
to play the same movie twice! It seems that I only have a
single chance to play a DivX movie: If I try to play another,
then ppt crashes.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? I have tried everything
within reason: reinstalling powerpoint, reinstalling the lates divx codecs,
trying "detect and repair", uninstalling all other codecs, reinstalling
the ATI video driver, turning off multimedia hardware acceleration, etc.

I am simply out of ideas as to what could be wrong. This happens
regardless of the DivX movie I am trying to play. Movies with other
codecs play just fine. Also, note that I can actually play the movies
just fine in both Windows Media Player and mplay32.

If anyone has any insights, I would be very grateful. This is
killing me.

Best,
-Jim

 

[Guest]

Just a clarification to this problem:

* I just reconfirmed out that both movies play fine in "mplay32" the first
time.
However, if I try to load another one from the same application
instance, then mplay32 will crash. Again it is a "second time" curse.

So now it seems that this isn't directly a problem with Powerpoint,
but something at the lower level related to media playback in windows.

In any case, if anyone has any idea, please let me know.

Thanks,
-Jim