Windows 7: Slow loading video files (up to 12 seconds)

Greeting all,

I have relatively minor but annoying problem I hope you can resolve for me.
The problem I have is when you double click any video file (AVI, MKV, MP4 etc) and open with Windows Media Player, there is no problem at all, It opens immediately. I however do not like WMP and have installed KMP Player (and Media Player Classic a couple of days ago).
The problem now is that when you double click the video files it takes up to 12 seconds for KMP Player to play the clip, (KPM player loads instantly by the way). This has only occurred over the last 3 weeks or so. Before it worked flawlessly.
I was going to do a system restore to around a month ago but could only go back 2 weeks so that was out of the question. I installed MPC 3 days ago and although the problem is still there it takes 5 seconds to play (rather than 12 seconds with KMP) using the sane media files. I have made KMP the default for the file types and still have the problem. I made sure indexing was on (in case that was the problem) and have Googled day and night for a solution. I feel this is a windows problem and not KMP or MPC issues.
What I have noticed is within Task manager, when you first double click the file, KMP immediately loads and only uses around 4meg of memory until the file is loaded then jumps to 18meg and plays ok. So what is happening in those 12 seconds? The same can be said with MPC player only its 6meg jumping to 25 meg in the 5 seconds.

Any thoughts??



Kind regards

Rad