Codec Hell - lost ability to read Divx/Xvid on windows

Hi guys,

after about 3 weeks away i've come back to find that in both PP and AE I'm having trouble with divx and xvid source files, which were working perfectly well before. As I'm unclear on how both of those access external codecs I'm at a bit of a loss.

They were all appearing as media offline. so first thing I thought was update ffdshow. at this point it started crashing PP when trying to open the source clip.

So next I uninstalled ffdshow, and went through cleaning up the registry. Now the media is offline again. Now I would have thought it would have then used the xvid codec. Reinstalled the xvid codec, still no dice.

This is a serious problem for me, if I had time i'd probably just flatten the machine and start again as its been a long time since I last did that, but I've got a performance on monday (which i found out about yesterday) and need to rework about 6 videos before then. Isn't that always the way? Things never go wrong when you've got plenty of time :)

all advice gratefully recieved!

Ian