Issues with Media Player Classic

After using MPC for about two or three years now, I’ve run into this annoying issue where movies start freezing up on me—the picture just hangs there while the audio keeps playing right along, and generally, everything has started stuttering lately.
My PC setup hasn't changed at all from what it was before. I've already tried the whole "uninstall and reinstall" routine, even resetting everything back to the factory defaults, but nothing changes; the results are identical. The only thing I did was install VLC, which works perfectly fine, and Windows Media Player is also behaving itself—it's just MPC that's acting up. Since it's easily my favorite player, I'd really rather not ditch it just yet.

Which version are we talking about here? And what kind of movies? If you're running a DVD, I need to know which decoder you've got installed on your machine. Honestly, if it's been two or three years since you last did it—it’s probably high time for a total Windows clean sweep. 🙂

You should definitely uninstall that thing or just wipe it clean using something like CCleaner

I’m not even sure if MPC can be "installed" per se... on my machine, it’s just this one portable file I carry around. Anyway, the real headache is that my newer movies—like the latest episodes of Lost and Prison Break—just won't "play." You know that annoying thing where you can scrub through the timeline and the image changes, but when you hit play, nothing happens? Yet, they work perfectly fine in the standard Windows Media Player.

On my other computer (my laptop), everything works just fine, both in the regular player and in MPC. Since I’m pretty sure I have the exact same drivers installed on both, I’m guessing the issue is buried a bit deeper—maybe something with Windows itself or just a weird hardware quirk.

How exactly am I supposed to get this second image onto my desktop—or even get it to show up at all? Most of my movies and music tracks are stuck displaying that first image, and frankly, I’d much prefer the second one. Is there some way to force the second image to appear for every single movie and song in my library?

Wait, what do you mean it isn't Taylor Swift? Maybe try adjusting your software settings to see if that fixes the display—or maybe I'm just totally tripping here..

I have searched through the entirety of the menu—checked every single section, really—and I simply could not locate such an item.