For a couple of days now, Windows Media Player (version 9.00.00.3349) has added a black horizontal band about 100 pixels high when playing videos. Depending on the skin, the black band is either at the bottom or split between top and bottom. I don't know why this black band suddenly appeared. Is there an easy way to get rid of it?

WMP9 is set to play only asf, avi, wma, and wmv files. Is there some replacement for WMP that could play these, so I could get rid of WMP completely?

Thanks in advance for all replies.

The Media Player Classic (not the Home Cinema version) 6.4.9.1 works on Win95 and up http://download.cnet.com/Media-Player-Classic/3000-2139_4-10518778.html

There are two versions of MPC 6.4.9.1, one of which runs on win9x/me, the other for win2000 and above. Here is a link to the MPC author's site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli2/files/. Or download the win9x/me version directly from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli2/files/Media%20Player%20Classic/6.4.9.1/mplayerc_20081005_win9x.zip/download

MPC is a directshow player, and thus uses Windows Media Player codecs to play windows media. Since the problems you are having are with playing windows media, and not some other formats, MPC thus may not correct the problem. Instead, I would recommend Videolan (VLC), which is not directshow and uses its own internal codecs to play windows media and lots of other formats as well. The last version of VLC to run on win 9x/me is vlc-0.8.6d-win32. This older version of VLC can be downloaded from http://filehippo.com/download_vlc/tech/3516/ .

I would also recommend that you try to fix Windows Media Player. First run an antivirus program, if you have one installed. Then do a complete backup of your harddrive, including a backup of the Windows Registry. Then visit the Microsoft update site, to update your Windows Media Player and download and install the latest WMP security updates and codecs for WMP version 9. You may also consider downloading and installing the WMP 9 program, itself, over your existing WMP 9 (i.e. reinstall WMP 9, but do NOT uninstall your old version of WMP).

Black bars disappeared when I turned off Captions & Subtitles.