Windows 7 - PC 'stutters' - video and sound when playing video

We only notice this when playing full screen video, but the PC will 'stutter', video will freeze and sound will jam for about 20 seconds. Our box is connected to an Optoma Projector via VGA and we may start a film with one monitor configured but i've noticed 'phantom monitors' (a second screen that doesn't exist) appearing after one of these freezes.

The resolution also often changes between 1280x720 and 1152x - this seems to go hand in hand with the freeze, presumably a reaction to this 'phantom monitor' appearing.

My box is an MSI Media Live, which comes with an NVidia GForce 6150 LE - i've tried the latest standard nvidia drivers and also used 'browse' to find the Microsoft Nvidia Driver Variant which doesn't fix the problem.

Has anyone got any idea how I might fix this or what the cause may be???

Thanks,

HC

An update on this: I added a registry key to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers from another post changing the time required before windows resets my video card.

Now when a crash happens i don't get resolution change/display reset (presumably because the timeout is now much higher) but the movie playing will freeze a little then catch up in a series of really fast frames.

So this is partially better, but the freeze is still happening and the sound still stutters horribly - I thought this was a video driver problem, but obviously not -- what else could be causing this???

Checking your drivers is a good first step. I suggest you check with your troubleshooters to help pinpoint the issue: Windows 7 features - Windows Troubleshooting - Microsoft Windows.

Tara
Windows Outreach Team

Sorry, I should say i'm a professional software developer and i've tried all the obvious things - we have the latest nvidia drivers. What's hard to trace is whether the display drivers crashing is actually the true cause or not - i'll have to perhaps learn about working through dump files..