Weird Region behavior with 2 DVDs

[hireegy]

Hi,
I am right now in the US, and without thinking I bought 3 DVDs recently. My laptop is a Dell, purchased in France. It has a HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GS30n DVD player from Hitachi, so something rather new. You immediately see the problem: region coding.

So I still tried the DVDs. And although 1 DVD ("Blow") managed to play through VLC but NOT from any other software I had (like Windows media player, media player classic), the other one ("Surrogates") seems to refuse to play. What it does is open VLC as an autorun (although there is only audio_ts and video_ts folders on that DVD), and then trying to open the DVD (displaying "dvd:///E:\" in the playlist); however, while this screen should last mere seconds, here it lasts forever, and I can see in windows task manager that vlc.exe steadily keeps building something in the RAM, last time I interrupted it it had reached 800 Mo in RAM. And the DVD keeps spinning forever. If I close VLC, the process is still there. If I try to close it through File/Close, it does nothing. If I right-click on "dvd:///E:\" after some time, VLC crashes.

So I have three questions:
1) with my drive being obviously RPC-2 with it being so new, how comes VLC could still open one mismatched region coded movie (I'm sure it's region coded because this is the message I get from windows media player!)?
2) what happened with the second movie, what is this behavior of loading some data forever in the RAM, and how could I check what is VLC really doing here?
3) Is there a chance I could watch this movie without buying a %µ£%£@ zone 1 player? Will AnyDVD work, if VLC is stuck? EDIT: AnyDVD did work. but it's a separate technique. The VLC Behavior remains to be understood!

One last thing, I tried to rip the second DVD with PowerISO, but clearly my version is too old because it was jammed with the fake CRC thing. How can a five dollar movie not even recent have such crazy protection...

Finally:
OS: Windows 7 64 bit, up to date
VLC: 2.0.4 32 bit for windows

Thanks a lot for your help!