Windows Vista - Video Playback Issues Using VLC

[George]

I previously was running XP on my Toshiba Laptop Pro L300-EZ1523. I had no video playback issues. Then my hard drive failed and I had to install Windows Vista. Since then, my video playback has been poor. I get a lot of pixelation, often to the point where I can only see a small part of the image (the rest is blackened out.) Any ideas how to  fix this issue? I thought it might be the new VLC update, so I switched back to 2.0.0, but still have the same problem.