These questions are difficult, because there could be a zillion possible causes for this.
I think the best thing to do would be to feed the AVI’s that crash into a diagnostic utility like
gspot or
avicodec to find out if they’re all made with a specific codec. If that’s the case, you could uninstall the codec, get a newer (or older) version of that codec, or use an alternate codec (for example xvid to decode divx contents), or use an alternate player (vlc media player).
Also, gspot has a render button. Do the MS rendering and see which filters/decoder files are in use when rendering the file. It could lock up, but you may find the file that causes the lockup/crash.
If ALL your AVI files crash, regardless of codec used, I don’t know what to suggest. Perhaps uninstall any codec pack you have (assuming you have one, and in the hope it removes any bad stuff), or reinstall DirectX.
