colour calibration problem please help!!

[vultusprime]

I am having some strange problems with the colour settings on my pc.
I've just installed win xp sp2 on a new hard drive and with it the nvidia drivers (178.24) for my geforce 7700 card.
The problem that I have and always had with the nvidia control panel was finding the right settings for desktop work, films and games.
To watch films my software of choice for several years has been ZoomPlayer and with it I've installed 2 sets of codec, XVID and LAZY MAN'S MKV for matrioska files and HAALI MEDIA SPLITTER
To tweak in-games brightness and gamma settings I use Asus OSD

Despite trying for several days to tweak the nvidia control panel I could not find the right settings for everything, sometimes the videos were too bright with white colour being washed out or sometimes the contrast were too dark, or the games were too dark to play.
When I thought that I was having problems, things just got worse when I noticed what appeared to be a second set of colour settings, different from the ones from the nvidia control panel. The first time it happened it was while playing a video with zooplayer, the screen went completely black. Now I have these two colour setting co-existing in my pc and they seem to overlap each other with different applications.

When I play a video file with windows mediaplayer it looks too brigth but with zoomplayer it looks darker, the exact same video file. Also when I play the video in a window with Zoom the colours are darker but at full screen overlay they change and become too bright

With games it is even stranger, When the game loads up it has one kind of settings (brightness, gamma, contrast etc..) which is quite bright, however after a few seconds a different setting comes into play where the picture is darker with stronger black&white contrasts and makes the game too dark and therefore I use Asus OSD to compensate but as you can imagine the result is a bit of a mess with gamma and contrast too high just to be able to see.

It's like there are two different colour settings in my pc, one bright and one too dark, and the game first uses one and then switches to the other. I don't understand where these two different settings come from. One is from nvidia control panel but what about the other one? Could it be a problem with my video drivers or maybe with some of my video software? (ZoomPlayer, Videolan)

Another problem with zoomplayer, which I do not know if it is related, is that quite often while I play MKV (matrioska) files Zoom crashes, giving me this error message:
The instruction at 0x03502e21 reference memory at 0xfffffffff the memory could not be read

Obviously there's something wrong with my pc but where exactely is the problem. The nvidia drivers? Zoomplayer? the codecs? Asus OSD (which I doubt). What problem can affect the colour settings for both video and games?

By the way what in the nvidia control panel affects gamma,contrast etc... in games?

Sorry for the long post but I've tried to explain the problem in detail. This has being going on already for several weeks and I need some suggestions on how to proceed. Thank you

 

[EndlessWaves]

Which monitor have you got? Recently monitor manufacturers have been adding dynamic brightness functions (DFC/Dynamic Contrast/DCR etc.) which adjust the brightness of the screen depending on the brightness of the picture and if you've got a poor one then that could be contributing to the problems. Usually they can be turned on - especially the poorer ones.

Personally, my experience with Asus software department has always been rather poor so that's what my first suspect would be. I'd uninstall the Asus software and see of that helps (you can always reinstall after you've found the problem).

You said you noticed a second set of colour settings but you didn't say where, where they part of the nvidia control panel, windows, or something else?

Also, do you have any ICC profile applied for your monitor?

 

[vultusprime]

My monitor is a Samsung syncmaster 740b. It has some features to change the image like magic colour, magic zone , magic bright2 etc...

But these are switched on from the monitor controls, they are not automatic.
The only thing I have installed from the monitor is its driver, I don't really know if this is an ICC profile.

The asus OSD is first activated on your desktop properties, then its control panel is turned on while playing a game and finally is manually activated to implement the changes. Each of these steps is manually controlled, if I don't do anything nothing happens.
I installed it simply because right from the start my games where just too dark to play and I had no problems with it in the past, some games required it while others not.

What I want to stress is that I have been using this pc for over 3 years now, before it ran under win xp sp1 then i removed the old hard drives, put a new one and installed win xp sp2. From a fresh installation i proceeded to install the same softwares that i had been using (asus OSD, zoomplayer, codecs etc...) the only difference is that I am using a more recent nvidia video driver 178.24 while before was 163.71.
At the beginning the only difficulty was trying to find the right colour setting, that's all. The real problem came out a few days later. It affects games and movies but not the desktop.

My zoom player doesn't work so well, for example some video files that I could play a day before now don't work anymore, only showing a black screen with audio only and as i mentioned before in window mode the colours are darker while in full screen they become very bright. It this problem that I have described has "2 different colour settings" for lack of a better word. And the same happens with the games, starts bright then turnes dark.

I don't know what's going on, I was thinking of removing zoom, all the codecs and maybe reinstall video drivers