assistance with DirectX problem

a couple days ago, my friend complained she could no longer watch movies on her computer. i went over and sure enough, nothing would play (audio plays, video is blank). didnt matter which format, WMP 10 wouldnt play anything.

things i have done
-scanned for virus, trojans, spyware - clean
-reinstalled WMP10, video drivers
-checked and re-checked all relevant settings

then i found this microsoft kb article
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306317/

when i did the DirectX tests, everything passed fine, but i found when i went into the advanced monitor options, and turned the hardware acceleration down to the 3rd from the left tick, which states
"Disable all DirectDraw and Direct3D accelerations as well as cursor and advanced drawing accelerations. Use this setting to correct sever problems with DirectX accelerated applictions."
the videos played back fine.

i have yet to uninstall and reinstall directX, but does anyone have any idea what the hell is going on? according to them, they didn't change anything and it just started doing this a few days ago.

Assuming the OS she's running is XP or W2K... Start | Run | Type eventvwr.msc and click OK | Highlight "Application" and "System" independently in the LH pane | Right click any error message(s) (critical errors are in Red), and select "Properties" | Write down a couple of the latest critical error messages exactly as they appear under the "Description" field, and post them in this thread. If you don't feel like writing them down ...when you right click an event and select "Properties", an "Information Properties" window will open. In the upper RH corner of the window is a button (just below the up/down arrow buttons) that when pressed copies the details of the event to the Clipboard. You can then paste the Clipboard contents of the logged error(s) in this thread.

Also, which video card and drivers does she have installed? When you reinstalled the video drivers, did you completely remove the old drivers from her system? When you reinstalled WMP10, how did you go about doing that?

when i reinstalled the video card drivers, i did not completely uninstall and reinstall. they are one of the intel on board graphics (can't remember which).

for WMP 10 i did completely uninstall, re-download, re-install.

when i am over there next i'll post the errors. thanks for the help.

Try this for DirectX.

1. Download the redistribute version.
2. Extract it into a temp folder.
3. Open up the DirectX.cab file.
4. Extract it into the same folder.
5. Select all of the *.inf files
6. Right click and hit install

I had a similar problem and I had to do this because you can't actually uninstall directx. You can't even reinstall unless going to a newer version. Atleast that has been my experience.

there were no errors listed in either section

i tried doing what you suggested hibner, but the problem persists.