I am having an issue on my pc thats driving me nuts. Almost all of the time when I view a video from a website such as youtube, break, spikedhumour etc it begins to load and starts playing but stops playing at the 2 second mark, sometimes 4 seconds. The entire video does load but just won't play past the 2-4 second mark.

I used winxp and firefox. The only way to make it work is close all firefox windows and then restart and it will work. After a period of time it stops again. That happened for 2-3 months and didnt want to problem solve as I knew I would be getting a new computer.

So now I have a new computer with Vista and basically no software on it except office and the same damn thing is happening. what the hell. anyone got any ideas.

I had this happen to me last week.
Unfortunately, I don't have a fix for you, just that closing firefox and trying later worked.
Other than just closing/reopening it, I have it set to auto-clear cache/etc on close - so try doing that, see if it helps.

I had this problem on both XP and Vista with an older version of Outpost firewall. Unloading Outpost and everything played fine. Eventually they fixed the bug. Doesn't sound like you have a firewall but just in case, keep that in mind.

still having this issue. any other suggestions.

-check this link

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10027752-2.html?tag=nl.e776