bk11 said:
Hi,

After hours of googling, trying different video codecs, players and being totally frustrated, I was trying to find video acceleration settings of my graphics card.

BUT, then found there was a Media Colour Enhancement menu in the video card settings. From there setting brighten movie or now even default profile made the videos watchable and bright from the previous overly dark ones.

Regards,
bk
BK11,

It has taken me awhile to get back here, but you are right, this was the issue!

On my AMD graphic card system, if I right-click on the desktop, I have a ASUS Splendid option, which permits a number of settings. I have been unable to find the program on my computer to actually disable it, but then found an option off of the desktop right click.

One simple "disable", and now WMP12 works fine! Strange, I could not find this option or program in the Control Panel to disable. Would like to uninstall it, but it does not show up in the list of programs.

This must have been installed when I updated my drivers some time ago, and then I just never used WMP12 until recently. Now, it appears everything is working fine.

Frustrating indeed, but glad that everything seems to be right again.

Again, thank you for pointing me in the right direction.