I am attempting to play purchased DVDs on my Acer Aspire 3620 running XP. They are extremely choppy and eventually slow to frame-by-frame or stop altogether. I have Windows Media Player 10, Power DVD 5, and Nero. They all have the same problem.

I have tried installing every shareware DVD player and later uninstalled it. I used regedit to try to get rid of them under the software area. I used msconfig to get rid of all non-essential programs on startup. When I run the Windows Media Utility to find the best decoder, the decoders from the uninstalled software are all still there. Windows Media says it picks the best one and ignores the others. I suspect there is still some kind of conflict from having installed all that software.

Any suggestions? Thank you in advance.

You probably made your problem 20x worse by installing all of those random dvd player programs into your system.

Most programs that install their own codecs never uninstall or remove them afterwards, so you most likely have a dozen or so random mpeg2 codecs in your system that are all conflicting.

You can try using a registry cleaner, like regcleaner or ccleaner, but i would recommend doing a fresh install of windows altogether.