The entire screen is a light black color. I can hear the music from the DVD & I'm able to click on the menu options but I see nothing. It's been happening with my desktop for a long while now but since I use my Notebook for DVDs more often I gave up trying to fix it. And just now it happened to my Notebook. I was going over some highlights of a movie, stopped - browsed online for a bit, then ran the program again & it no longer worked... has anyone ever experienced this?

What version of Power DVD is it. I had problems with mine, although not the same as yours, it worked fine for ages and then suddenly stopped playing files due to an error. I got an official patch upgrade from the CyberLink site and now it works fine again. Worth a try!