Peripheral

My WMP in Vista Business stopped rending multimedia video colors correctly some months ago (.wmv files come to mind, but it's only in video files and most all the usual Windows-and Mac-compatible formats). I wasn't concerned about it until now when I need to see videos correctly for work. It's too late to look for a system restore image that long ago.

The Vista desktop, etc. and applications are all working great with my two monitors in the DualView mode of my NVIDIA display adapter. So I've begun learning about device-related stuff like video VolatileSettings and wonder if they will re-generate themselves if I delete them. But I don't want to make the situation worse by trying more experiments... but I would like to learn about video (de-)compression issues that might be at play here...

I've tried CCCP codec pack and a few other sensible approaches, still can't play .avis, .mpgs, and others in any player (including VLC) to see anything but a blue-green & white screen on my CRT and blank screen on my LCD. I'm sure DVDs play fine in their app. Audio is working normally I think. Something corrupted the video player performance and I suspect it was the switch to DualView. Can I fix it without moving back to Clone mode? I really need this to work normally but am open to serious advice if I must upgrade something in my Lenovo T61P to get it working. One can watch blue-green video only so long...

I wanted to try to uninstall and reinstall WMP 11, but read that requires a comples OS reinstall. I don't have time for that nonsense. Can anyone help?! Thanks in advance if you try.