[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.

[edfer]

I too get the video Card and Drivers msg but after clicking ok, the Media Center opens up and seems to work OK. So why not just let the opening msg be and ignore it?