Video files & Cold reset

Hello, i am infront of a strange problem. Everytime i open some video files with any media player my system resets. For example if i load in my list 10video files i can play those 10 files 20times without a problem, other times i may just try to play the 1st file only and my system to reset. I checked that it has nothing to do with a kind of file type, it happens with all of them, avi,mpg,wmv...

At the beginning i thought it was windows media player that was causing that, so i upgraded from 9 serious to 10. the problem was still here, so i tried with other media players and saw that the problem with reset didnt stop.

I reinstalled drivers of the vga, tv tuner but this didnt change anything
I thought about the codecs, but if the problem were the codecs it would have a problem everytime cause it would be unable to load the file and not sometimes

I did put my cpu/vga freq. to default (also underclocked) and made stability tests , the tests were succesful and showed a stable system (as the matter of fact i dont have any problem with something else just with the video files).
I checked also the temps, they are normal (under 40c normal and under 45full).

What i havent tried is to reinstall SP2 . On the same machine i had a couple of weeks ago win2k with the same hardware/software and didn't have any problem at all

My system is following:

PS. i am on default right now.

-OS: WinXP Prof. SP2
-CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.06@3726Mhz HT
-Cooling: Thermalright SP94 + Thermaltake Smart Fan II
-Mainboard: Asus P4T533
-Ram: 2x256MB Samsung Rambus 1066@1296mhz
-VGA: Asus Nvidia MX440 128MB 275@365 , 405@567
-HD: 1x80GB 1x160GB 8MB Cache Western Digital
-Other: Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP Expert, Micronet SP2500R 10/100 Ethernet
-Monitor: 19" Iiama LS90UT

First thing I'd do is check out your event viewer. It's in the Administrative Tools under control panel. Look under the 3 event types and you should come across some errors, with hopefully some helpful information. I'm thinking it could be a device drive conflict (I've had something similar happen before), but check that out first and see what you can find.

By default, Windows XP does not give BSOD's when a serious error occurs, it simply does a memory dump and reboots the system. You could turn that off if you want to catch the error in progress and get the BSOD. Post if you wanna know how to do that.

How could i enable this BSOD that you mentioned above ?
As for the event viewer... i couldn't find any error, its also logic that i couldn't cause it resets and doesnt log the error.

System Properties | "Advanced" tab | Startup and recovery-->"Settings" button | Under "System Failure", uncheck "Automatically restart".

thank you very much, i found by mistake in google Thank you anyway.

Some how since i did this i didn't get any error, i think it got afraid that i will find out what it was Don't ask me.

Thank you both .

Ha! Cowardly computer. Ah well, I hope the problem doesn't resurface itself, it's always a good thing when a computer fixes itself.

Well i think i wanted to much this to end and finally it didn't... it apperead again.

I did what you told me and the blue screen appeared finally.
The message was about DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL .
So i understood that it has to do with Audio and Video Drivers. I dissabled the audio drivers (the soundcard is onboard) and then i didn't see any problem while playing the video files (sure it could be also luck to run 100 files and not to reset).
When i enabled the driver of the audio after a couple of files it crashed.

So i reinstalled all the drivers, video,audio,chipset,tv tuner.
But what i saw i don't know if it is really good, the tv tuner and audio had the same irq. 21. Well after all that installation/uninstall the result was the same.

So i decided to format and install winXP again, cause i thought that i would save more time than installing clean windows than searching for the problem.
I installed as following the drivers(as always with win2k also)

1) Chipset
2) Audio
3) Usb 2
4) Vga
5) Tv tuner

Well even after that the problem still appears. Just once it showed me an error to cmaudio.sys, but that was just once, all the other times i dont get any specific error or something else. Well the error says about shadowing and caching and to check my hardware but thats some kind of bull***t . I haven't changed anything on the hardware. It stings like 99% software. Any idea what could i try with that ?

well something that i could also add is this:

*** Address BFD73AC9 base at BFD4F000 Datestamp 3ba1edfe - cmaudio.sys
Beginning dump of physical memory

Thats something i get on the blue screen (sometimes)
Its my audio driver but i install also latest drivers.
Changed PCI slots to all my pci cards, didnt bring anything ,
i also changed the memory from slot1->slot2 and reversed.

It's a drivers or conflict issue for sure. My next step would be to see if an actual sound card would fix the issue if you had one laying around. I've had issues with onboard sound before and it fixed it by putting in a seperate card before.

Before all that, I'm assuming that you have completely updated your vid card's drivers?

Well yes i installed many times my vid drivers. As for the soundcard i find it a bit strange, it is an onboard soundcard, it was always working it should also now. It cant from nothing not to work anymore.

I did remove also TV Tuner, DVD-RW, one HDD, changed pcis in some cards. Removed every codec, every driver of those devices. But still the problem existed.
It only stops when i disable the audio device. How could i fix those conflicts ?

i did restore to SP1 just in case to see, but didn't change anything.

This thing starts to give on my nerves...