After attempting to play back some MPEG and DivX videos, I was getting strange colors in every program I was using, including VLC, Windows Media Player and mplayer. Even tweaking the gamma, constrast, hue, brightness and every other setting I could find, the video still looked washed out and dark. The only thing affected was video playback. The desktop, web browsing and games all looked fine. Finally, I figured out that in the NVidia control panel, there are seperate settings for video playback. Somehow they had all been changed to bizzare values. All it took was to return them to the default to fix the problem. Very strange, as I know I didn’t touch any of these values and I had just reinstalled this system from scratch. Anyway, hope this helps someone Googling this problem as I wasn’t able to find any useful information.