wmp plugin problem

hey guys when ever i try to watch a movie on a website that used an embedded windows media player it wont play, the buttons and such are greyed out.
this does this on both ff and IE. i tired uninstalling and re installing wmp 10 and no luck... and getting wmp 11 is completely out of the picture due to xp issues.
any sugggestions on how to get this to work? i'm assumng its a problem with the plugins as its doing this on both browsers