so, after Vantrepes response, I thought "I can't have been that stupid and screwed up putting a DVD into the machine...right?" on top of finding corroborating comments online...
So, I went and put another movie into the laptop and up pops a Compaq movie player to play the disk! It had never ever opened before. So the regular disk played right away. OK, so on that one I feel a bit stupid, but on further reflection, I think that I was actually trying to use my laptop to play movies that I had saved for playing over TCPMP (an my Axim pda) so I think the Divx Player is just the kind of thing I was looking for!
