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One more thing on this that i discovered. I did some tracing of video codecs on my machine and found that, while ffdshow wasn't the culprit, a hauppauge codec that was installed on the machine was also causing problems. You can download this utility to help in disabling codecs that may be problematic. Hope this helps someone.

O.K. That worked. I am still trying to figure out Vista after a year of using it! I couldn't get divx to recognize the last file there as a mpg but it did the first four just fine. Thanks again for providing such great support.
If you don't mind, i would like to post this over in the Stardock forums to help others. I think that this mpeg1 problem is plaguing a lot of Vista users.

I re-encoded the files as you suggested with divx. (I own the pro version.)That didn't fix the problem. I then played the movies inside of wmp and they are very brief. The logo for the game which i believe is the first movie to play doesn't appear to be complete. It's about 2 or 3 seconds long. The movie that hangs the game also stops in media player at the exact same location that it hangs in the game. The progress bar in wmp indicates that that is the end of the movie. I believe that these movie files are corrupt. Is there some way that i could download them? I have already tried to redownload the game from tgn and that didn't help.

@@@ EDIT @@@ Hold on....i can play the files with nero show time for some reason. But not with windows media player.......

O.K. Wow! Thanks for the fast reply! I will give this a shot later tonight. I'll report back and let you know how this worked out so that others may also benefit.

I purchased Al Emmo and the lost dutchmans mine on 4-25-08 from Stardock on TGN and cannot get past the opening movie when playing on Vista Ultimate. I checked to see if i was running ffdshow and that was not the problem. I discovered that if i hold down the esc key when choosing a new game or to load a game, the movie doesn't play and i jump into the game. If i continue to play this way, am i missing anything in the game other than the opening movie?