Screenshot of Windows Media Player shows black instead of video image.

When I opened a client’s Word document containing a screen capture of a video player (she was trying to show me one frame of the video), the image of the video screen was blank. This turns out to be because when the video plays, it is actually playing in an overlay produced by hardware acceleration, which is NOT captured by most screen capture programs. To capture screenshots from video, you have to turn off hardware acceleration.

To disable it on Windows XP, select Run/Settings/Control Panel/Display
Then in the Display Properties window, select the Settings Tab. Click the Advanced button on the bottom of that panel. Then click the Troubleshoot tab.

Then, under Hardware Acceleration, drag the slider to None, and hit the OK button at the bottom of the window.

Thanks to the folks at any-capture.com for this one.