MAFinOKC

After years of being satisfied Dell customers, we had a horrible experience last year with a new Dell, so now we've gone to buying from a reputable local no-name clone shop. We're running Win XP Home on a PC with a Gigabyte main board, an AMD Phenom II processor, and a Radeon X1550 Series video card. It came with a Cyberlink DVD program that didn't seem to be working right, so I uninstalled it. So of course Windows Media Player became unable to play DVDs. I installed MPlayer Media Player and it plays DVDs just fine, but WMP didn't pick up the appropriate codecs for DVD playing from it. I installed XP Codec Pack 2.5.0 and now WMP says there's a conflict about digital rights management. XP Codec Pack installed the old Windows Media Player Classic and when I try to play DVDs on it, I get the error message "Digital Copy Protect Failure." Updating the video driver didn't help. What should I do next? Is it worth it to buy one of the Windows Media Player plugins for sale on the Microsoft website? I really hate to buy anything from Microsoft I don't have to buy.

I work in a large hospital complex. I visit the hospital floors every day. My office computer and the hospital computers are running Win XP Pro and Office 2003. Most of the staff-access computers on the hospital floors are now totally locked down using single-sign-on. They provide access to server-based Office apps, so if you need to use one, you connect to the server over a Citrix connection. They provide access to your network share so that you can save documents to your personal space. Customized settings, e.g. changes I make in the global template Normal.dot (I'm guessing that's what I'm modifying), are periodically purged and the template is reset to the basic default template. Is there a way to have a template stored somewhere on my computer or network share that I can access to restore all my personal settings? I have looked at the Template and Add-ins function in Microsoft Word, but I can't find any good explanation of how to do what I want to do. Any suggestions?