audio garbled, video in stripes

[dr. phyto]

Dear Forum;

On my desktop pc, any video I try to play (avi, mpg, wmv.) would play garbled audio. The same video would play fine in wmp. Also, sometimes the video was in fine stripes with something in between. Stopping and restarting the video would resize and fix the problem, but the audio was always still garbled (almost sounds like echoes). So I removed and re-installed VLC player. Now, not only is the audio still garbled, but the video is always striped and I cannot fix the stripes as before. Like I said too, wmp plays these same videos (video and audio) just fine and I have tried it on at least 20 videos. I've been reading the forums and cannot find an answer. Please help.

ps, vlc won't play plain 'ol mp3's either. Totally garbled.

Charles