Yayness

I recently obtained ("legally" wink wink nudge nudge) Need For Speed Most Wanted. Anyway, in order to run it properly, a friend of mine downloaded and installed the newest Omega Drivers.

The problem I have now: No videos want to run anymore. You see the first 4 seconds, then it crashes. Always. I've tried it with Winamp, PowerDVD... I've reinstalled both and nothing works.

Could the Omega-Driver thing be related? And what can I do to correct/analyze the problem? Of course, I didn't create a backup copy! :'(

Notebook Specs:

eMachines
M2350
Mobile AMD Athlon XP 2800+
1.44GHz
448MB of RAM
ATI U1/A3 Accelerated Graphics Port

Driver Installed: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ (ATI Radeon, Windows XP)

Now, my best guess is that I had the stock driver from ATI or eMachines.. I never downloaded any other Driver. An exact description of the problem:
I go to run a movie (.mpg or .avi) in (for example) Winamp.. It gives me about 5 seconds of sound, with the first frame frozen, and then even the sound stops. At that point, I open task manager to close Winamp (which stops responding), and get a 100% CPU usage.. I am forced to turn off the notebook because it crashes.

What really makes me wonder is the fact that NSFMW suddenly works a-ok, whereas before it didn't work at all (all you got were these rainbow-colored squares that really moved fast). Music Files can also be played with Winamp as well as PowerDVD.

On the ATI Control Panel, it has some options changed where I want to know if they're correct:

1] Instead of OpenGL, Direct3D is checked. It also is set on "custom settings".. Can this be the cause?

2] Under "Troubleshoot", it says "Full Hardware Acceleration". Is this right?

3] "VPU Recover" is on and enabled.. What does this do?

4] MipMap and Texture are both set to "performance" and "wait for vertical sync" is set to "Application Preference"

5] 96DPI...

Anyway, I really thank all of you for helping out.. =/ sorry to bug you