RTW: Movie-related crashes

[Sagus]

Took me some time to find an answer to why my RTW+BI v1.6 kept crashing on each start-up, but as soon as I've found the "-nm" trick the crashes went away.

However, that leaves me without the in-game movies, and it just won't do.
My guess is that the crashes have something to do with the codecs, but I have no idea where to start looking for the culprit. Various codecs have accumulated in my system over the past few years, and without a complete Windows (XP SP2) reinstall I doubt I can sort out the problem on my own (even then, I see no guarantees).

Still, I do have some info that might help:
- The game's WMV files play fine when started from Windows Explorer - in both WMP9 and other players.
- The system is using FFDShow to handle most of the decoding, but setting the game's executables in FFDShow's exclusions or disabling its WMV decoding produces no effect on the game's crashes.
- Just to be on the safe side, I have installed the WMV9 codecs that came with RTW and were suggested during its installation.

So, can anyone help?

[Brusilov]

The only advice that I've ever heard was to make sure the latest version of Windows Media Player is installed on the PC. That appears to solve most of the problems - although maybe not in your case....

Apparently, WMP11 is the latest version.

[Sagus]

Yes, installing WMP11 didn't help, unfortunately...