Scarletdown's Journal: Does Silverlight Break Video Capture Devices?

For at least a year now, I have tried off and on to get my housemate's primary computer operational with video capture capability so that he can do screenshots and clips from the assorted game consoles set up in his room, and to actually be able to play these consoles on his nice big monitor instead of the old composite Amiga CRT that they are all connected to.

All attempts have failed miserably with three different devices thus far (ATI TV Wonder USB, a more or less generic USB capture device, which I am currently using on my own system, and a little Syntek STK1160 USB device). On all three, the capture or viewing apps used (WinDVR 3, VLC, and Ulead VideoStudio) gave either a blank display with a claim of no video input detected, or a super garbled neon green image.

At first I thought the problem may be with his video card, GeForce 8600GT PCIe, or the drivers, but as the frustrations progressed, I determined that this was not where the fault lies. To further test, I connected the most recent device, the Syntek, into one of my test systems, running XP Pro with SP3, and installed the drivers and all three apps. It worked flawlessly.

One major difference between the two is that his has Microsoft Silverlight installed so he can stream Netflix on his computer. Neither my test box nor my primary system here had Silverlight installed. So I decided to conduct one more test.

I created a system restore point, installed Silverlight on the test box and tried WinDVR again. It was still working. Then I uninstalled the drivers for the SynTek and reinstalled. Sure enough, video capture no longer worked, showing the same symptoms as the other box.

For the next step in the testing process, I uninstalled Silverlight and did a reboot. Now the video capture still does not work. Somehow, Uninstall did not uninstall everything Silverlight had put on the system, which is pretty shitty behavior for any application. Uninstall should mean just that. Get your crappe and everything that came with it off my hard drive and return the system back to how it was beforehand.

Continuing the quest, I have uninstalled and reinstalled the video capture drivers, and went ahead and did another reboot. The video capture device still does not work. So now I am back to square one. On the test box, I can just restore from the restore point I set, but it is way too late for that on the other. Would anyone who may be reading this have any suggestions on how to completely eradicate Silverlight without completely reinstalling Windows?