No sooner do I solve one multimedia problem than another seems to come up. I solved the problem I had been having with various programs not playing well with the driver for my Hauppage WinTV Go card (and the driver itself not uninstalling correctly) by doing a complete registry clean of all Hauppage-related entries, then installing a whole new video capture card (AVerTV PCI, broadly comparable to the WinTV Go except that its provided software records MPEG2 right out of the box and the WinTV Go's software only does AVI, which is why I was using PowerVCR II in the first place).

However, another problem has come up: Cyberlink PowerDVD XP (4.0), the program I've been using for almost two years now in various releases to watch and vidcap DVD's, and more recently, to watch and vidcap MPEG clips created with PowerVCR II, is no longer working. It was working properly the last time I played DVD's and MPEG's on it, which was actually close on to four weeks ago, but I loaded a MPEG clip today, tried to play it, and found that PowerDVD has conked out. It stops responding when asked to play anything - a MPEG clip or DVD - and has to be C/A/D'ed to force it to close down. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling it three times now, as well as several attempts to find and remove anything in the Registry connected with the program (and I also uninstalled PowerProducer 2.0, from the same company, which I had recently installed, on the theory that something must have mucked up PowerDVD), and did a clean install of PowerDVD, and have even tried the most recent patch from Cyberlink, but no go. PowerVCR II is working just fine, though, and I can still record, play and vidcap MPEG clips, but as of right now I can no longer play DVD's on my machine. :(

I'm frankly at a loss to figure out what might have caused this, aside from something that might have gone awry in this past week's struggles with various video-capture-card drivers, or maybe Windows Media Player 9 (but I installed that version last month, and it didn't interfere at all with the functioning of PowerDVD). Does anyone have any ideas?

-Joe-

Nobody seems to have any notion why PowerDVD went *phffftt*, judging from the lack of replies, and Cyberlink's support hasn't been terribly helpful either; they suggested simply that I try the latest patch (upgrading to build # 2417 of PowerDVD XP 4.0). I did that, but the program still wouldn't work (same symptoms, froze when I tried to play a DVD or media file or even opened a menu item).

So I switched to WinDVD 4. The controls are different from PowerDVD's - for instance, I can't find a keyboard shortcut for "frame step forward" or "frame step back" - but I like the "capture browser" where you can view the vidcaps you make before saving them to disk and toss any that aren't quite up to snuff. More to the point, though, WinDVD works in all respects.

-Joe-

Sorry I couldn't help with the problem, but I am glad you found a workable alternative. I just don't use DVD software enough to know anything about it....