video color weirdness

A while ago (maybe about the time I had my machine in to a shop to install 2 new DVD devices), I started having trouble with color displaying in almost all video files. It doesn't matter whether the file is .rm, .avi, .asf, .mpg ... . Rather than showing normal color, the clips appeared washed out with all the areas of brighter tones being washed out to white and the darker tones shading from a kind of faded light blue to full black. The result is that you get an overall notion of the image, but only roughly. You sometimes see this kind of effect when filmmakers are trying to look artistic and maybe with very bad home movies.

Now for further weirdness. Although this effect ruins files from both my hard drive and streaming video, too, there is a set of files on my hard drive that display normally - some tutorial files for Flash in .wmv format. That is SO puzzling. WHY???

In Windows Explorer the thumbnails (still images) of "bad" video files show full, normal color.

I've poked around in various Windows options, installed new codecs, everything really obvious, I think. Now I really need new suggestions.

My system is Windows XP, my video card just a simple Graphics ProSavageDDR.

It would be great if you could email your reply, as well as posting here. I'm a new member, so I don't know if you can see my registered email address, but this one is just as good:
videoproblemwindowsbbs.12.ge_moore.spamgourmet.com

Thanks from Toronto.

 

Thanks for the ideas, Peter, although I haven't found the answer yet.

I downloaded the latest driver for my video controller, downloaded and re-installed Windows Media Player 9 and, earlier, installed new codecs. The problem has not changed.

One thing you didn't note was that, while almost all .wmv files display badly, a certain set of them display OK. Since they are on my d: drive, I even downloaded a video file to that drive and ran it from there, just in case there was something about the c: drive. No luck.

That gave me another idea. What happens to video files stored on CDs? All I had were those same Flash tutorials in .wmv format and they ran fine (as they did from the HD). QuickTime .mov files on a CD also run fine. I wasn't able to test any other video files from CD (but I will try to find some over the next few days).