Windows Media player [11] won't play films

I am running Vista on my new laptop and I have three films that won't play, two are .avi files and windows media player says it has aquired the codex but the sound of these two films plays but I get no picture only a swirly pattern. Thew other film is a .bin file and windows media player says it doesn't reconise it. All three of these films play ok on my old machine running XP. How can I play them with Vista?
Regards Paul

 

Hello Paul,

On XP you had WMP9 or 10, in Vista, the version is 11.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918218 MS Troubleshooter for WMP11.

http://www.updatexp.com/sherlock-codec-detective.html Download and run this small program that will list the codecs on your system. If it spots a broken one, it'll highlight it.

I've modified your title to indicate WMP11 is the media player version.