Have you tried an older version of a media player (you can get old
versions of VLC from their download page).
Lots of programs update themselves along with the latest versions
of windows, and windows 7 is no longer supported.
If it started out as intermittent and is now constant, that sounds to me like an overheating issue. You might try opening up your computer case and blasting everything with “compressed air” (it’s not actually air, but that’s what everyone calls it). Be warned that this is likely to create a huge cloud of dust.
Took it outside and blew it out. There was a lot of dust on the fins under the fan so I really hoped this would solve my problem but it did not. At least it is cleaner in there.
I ran AVG Antivirus and Malwarebytes. Both found minor things and eliminated them but this did not solve my player crash problem.
Exactly what computer do you have? My guess is that since you are running Windows 7 on it that it is a fairly old computer and it is probably worth $50 or so if it were working correctly and what I would do after spending all this effort with no success is simply buy another refurbished/used computer on eBay.
@Chronos mentioned overheating; anyone think this could be a fan problem?
One thing you might do is take a portable USB drive and boot Linux or some portable version of Windows 10 or 11 from it, and see if everything suddenly works or not.
It is an HP Pavilion Slimline s5-1160 from around 2011. I can see that the fan is spinning, but, of course, I don’t know if it is at the full correct speed.
install HWMonitor and check the temperature of your pc components
If you can figure out which is the video chip, check that the heat sink is tight on it. I helped with a computer once that died about 30 seconds after it finished booting. One anchor of the heat sink had come loose, it was hanging off the chip, so within a minute or two the CPU overheated.