Okay, a few days ago, I had a problem where my computer booted up with 16-bit colors, no video graphics card, no mouse support, and no audio... I had to uninstall all that and then windows detected that it was missing, and then it all got reinstalled...
I was watching an avi file (it's an hour and a half long and about 695mb, for those keeping track) a few days before this happened... and it was working fine. Now, it shows up as ASCII ART! The sound plays fine, but the video is just ascii and all weird-colored... and it opens in DOS, too. VERY weird.
I use WindowsME and am using the latest version of VLC.