every media player i use locks up system completely

every time i try to play a video my system locks up. Ive tried using all kinds of media players, Kantaris, PlayItAll, VLC, WMP. doesnt matter which one i use. If I click on the file to open system locks up immediately and completely! cant even ctrl+alt+del. If I open the program first and try to play file from there it loads, but quickly locks up anyway. Again completely locking system, wont allow me to do ANYTHING but reset system with reset button.Quicktime seems to work fine however.

 

hard drive came out of an old gateway and had xp home no sp, and videos worked fine, have since done all the windows updates up to and including sp3, but didn't try videos after each install so don't know exactly when it started.No malware showing in any scans. Only codecs installed would have been by the associated video player. Dont know how to boot into safe mode with this system. cant even boot to bios set up. MB and drive came from gateway, book for old comp says f2 and MB support site says f1 but neither work. have tried repeatedly MB is genuine intel. File type doesn't seem to matter, seems to be the program itself locking up, but majority of files are .avi. They were located in C:\docs&settings\mine\my docs\videos, have moved to D:\videos and same results.Cant get an event log for that time as i have to reboot system and it restarts application logs with each restart. system log doesn't show anything around the exact time either. only a couple min before or after, and cant locate the logs through the file browser for adding attachments.

 

im not an idiot! I basicaly took the gateway MB/proc/mem/hd and put it in my case, added a 300gig seagate hd, hp dvd writer, and liteon dvd rom.....really not that hard to do works just fine except the vids locking up

 

Since you harvested hardware from the old Gateway, have you, as a test, tried plugging in the video card from the old Gateway into the case where you moved everything else?