No sound on all video players - Media Center, Media Player, Real Playe

Hello all, I had my computer fixed a couple years back and the technician installed XP Media Center Edition on it. At first everything worked fine but eventually I started to get weird error messages when trying to watch DVDs (something about a missing codec or something, I can't remember as this was a long time ago). Frustrated, I Googled a solution and ended up downloading a trial version of Corel WinDVD. It worked great, but I had to change my laptop's settings quite a bit to get it to work properly (including changing some default settings). Again, I'm sorry I can't be more specific on what I did, I was kinda desperate to get my computer to play video again and so I was just sort of randomly trying things, following instructions I found in forums, until it finally worked. Pretty soon the trial period on WinDVD ran out and I was left where I started, and simply didn't watch DVDS on my laptop for months and months. Now I'm starting to try and see if I can figure it out again, but I'm running into trouble with audio. I updated my version of Media Center, and I also installed the newest version of Media Player for XP (but for some reason it doesn't work, I'm going to have to try reinstalling…). Media Center will now play DVDs, as will Real Player, but neither of them have any sound. I don't think it's my laptop because my sound is fine otherwise (all the sound effects in Media Center work, for example, as well as all other software programs and Windows sounds) although I have some ongoing issues with streaming audio/video on Firefox and Google Chrome (I use IE for browsing Youtube, listening to Pandora, and whatnot). Does anyone have any idea what it could be, and what I can do to get Media Center, or Real Player, or preferably both to play sound again? I'm so disheartened that the video is finally working but I'm just as unable to watch DVDs as I was before. :[ BTW as you can probably tell I'm basically technologically incompetent.. so please keep explanations and advice simple? Thanks so much for any advice!!

Hi, Sorry to hear of the problem with your sound on DVD
As your sound works Ok on your laptop apart from when you play DVDs its worth while downloading and installing VL Player to see if this effects a cure
Have a look here for the download. (Its free of charge, being "open source")
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Regards
paws

Paws, Thank you so much for your quick response, and the recommendation of VL Player! It's working perfectly! Does anyone have any insight into the problems with Media Center and Real Player? Has anyone else had this issue? I forgot to mention that I have a Dell Inspiron E1405 laptop, running Windows XP with SP3 and Media Center 2002 Edition (with the 2005 updates from Microsoft's website)

Hi , Glad your VLplayer is working OK Well done The problem with your Win Media Player can sometimes be overcome by installing an up to date reliable codec or uninstalling the application, rebooting your machine and doing a clean up of the registry (Same procedure applies to Real) and then carrying out a reinstall of the two programs….. Its a little bit of work to do….so you may be happy to just use VLplayer, (it has a good reputation for being reliable, robust, and just doing the required job… Regards paws