Computer Help Please?

After behaving strangely for a while, my computer went back to normal ... except that it won't play .wmv or .mp4 videos. It has no trouble with videos in general, it'll play .avi, for example, it just has trouble with those formats, which it never used to.Any ideas what I should do? Thanks.

I too use VLC.

They play ... kind of. Sometimes the screen is all gray, sometimes its grey overlying the movie, sometimes there are some blocks which are gray and some blocks which are the true color of the movie ... and when I say "sometimes" I mean it varies from one to the other every half second or so. It looks, in fact, like the .wmv or .mp4 file is fucked, but it isn't, the same file plays fine on other computers. Their player "terminates unexpectedly" whenever I try to open anything, including files in a format I can play.

Yes. Well it comes with a thing called Media Player Classic Home Cinema, so I tried using that. Will it have put the codecs where other media players can see them?

Ah, no. That's fixed it.As I said, my computer was behaving oddly for a while, and then it stopped. When it stopped, it spontaneously reverted to an earlier state; it left my data files alone, but some programs disappeared and even my background wallpaper went back a few years.Well, apparently VLC reverted to version 0.8. Now I've updated to the latest version, it works fine.Thanks.

How do I get rid of adware? Sites I don't want to open keep hijacking my browser.

No, that came first.What happened was that trying to fix my video problem I downloaded a codec package and played, which didn't fix the problem, but this stuff came with it, I think it's practically legitimate. But getting rid of the software didn't get rid of the adverts that pay for it. It's not getting worse, I have had some awful adware before, this stuff is positively benign. But annoying.