I had to restore my pc recently and now my WMP won't show videos. I can hear the videos, but what I see is the colorful swirls that I see when I listen to music. I even dl'd the newest version but it didn't help. Any ideas?
VLC rocks. Mainly because it comes with just about every video and audio codec under the sun.
Unlike WMP, Where you have to download the codecs manually (and 99% of the time pay for them)
Which is what has happened to you, you had the codec in WMP before, reformatted and now the codec is gone. A newer version of WMP might have it again, but I would just switch to VLC. You won't regret it.
edit: A tell tale sign that you don't have the right codec for that video type is getting audio but no video feed, occasionly it might tell you it's not supported or you need a new codec - but usually not.
WMP sucks! Download Divx for movies. Its free and its great. WMP is so slow and sooooo crap. I've constantly problems with it. I use Divx for movies and iTunes for music