I need help! And I wouldn't normally use this forum for it, but I want to make sure I ask all my available geeky friends. ;-)

The other night I tried to watch an online episode of Survivor and in order to do so, I upgraded to Media Player 11. It never worked and I gave up on that. But now I can't watch anything I used to watch (mostly video's off of CNN). I only get the message I've linked to below which says "Can not create DirectShow Player".

So I've been trying to fix this and spent most of last night trying things. I tried rolling back to the previous version of MP, but that didn't seem to work. Tried removing it all together and reinstalling version 10, but it still thinks it exists somewhere on my computer. Tried upgrading Firefox (which needed doing anyway), but that didn't work either. And it also doesn't work in IE, I checked.

So, does anyone have any suggestions? The only thing I've found online suggests going into safe mode and changing the registry, which is something I'm not comfortable with unless I have explicit, step-by-step instructions (that I can't seem to find).