gedeons

Many, many thanks to lafitzp . Everyone - check out his/her solution. I tried it and -WOW- I have my Media Center working flawlessly now. I was getting "the error" when entering MC and nothing would play. Here's what he/she said: check your hardware acceleration if you are getting the black screen on all videos - well Real Player and Quicktime are fine, but I could not play a DVD, nor did Media Center even have a DVD option any longer. That fixed it all. Go to control panel, display, settings, advanced and then troubleshooting. My hardware acceleration was turned off - I had been on the chat line with HP support quite a few time fooling around with the drivers etc for sooooooo many hours over a couple months now. They were at the point of telling me I had to perform a destructive recovery; to go back to my original hard drive restore version from when I first purchased my computer! But, lucky for me, they did point me to this web page! lafitzp gave the easiest, most logical first step. Thanks again lafitzp.