Problems with Brightness While Viewing Video Files

[gabebillings]

I'm having an odd problem that just recently cropped up. About a week ago I wiped my hard drives and reinstalled XP along with all my software. I'd been using Video Studio 7 for a while and decided to upgrade to 10, which I didn't install until after the OS reinstall.

Having done this I obviously tweaked something in the system, as certain video files are now much darker than they should be. So a file I know was fine a week ago now seems to have the brightness far lower than it used to be.

It seems to be affecting .avi and .wmv files. There doesn't seem to be a change in .mov and .mp4 files, and online video streams like YouTube and google video are unaffected.

Here's another odd thing... If I view a bunch of thumbnails of .wmv in Windows Explorer all the stills look fine. But when you play the actual file it's dark.

If I pull up one of those files in VS10's editing window it's dark while it's playing, but anytime it's paused the brightness is back to normal.

Obviously something is wrong on a system-wide level. I don't know much about how video codecs work. Is there anything there that could be cauing this? I'd appreciate any help anyone could offer. Thanks.

[gabebillings]

I should have noted (before someone asks) that the video drivers are up to date, as is Windows.

[maddrummer3301]

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[gabebillings]

One thing I did while reinstalling was to check msconfig after each program install to see what processes were getting jammed into the startup list. Even having turned off quite a few I still have an awful lot running.

There were at least a couple from the nVidia drivers which I turned back on and then rebooted the computer. I checked, but was still having the issue. Then I was playing around with the nVidia tools, but I don't recall having actually changed anything.

And yet now it works. If only I knew what exactly I did. Anyhow, seems like it's fixed. Thanks for the help.