I am out of ideas as to how to remedy this, so hopefully someone here can help. I have the K-Lite Mega Codec pack installed on both my laptop and desktop. I downloaded some hi-def movie trailers from the Quicktime site. On my PC, they play fine, volume/balance is great. On my laptop, however, any talking/voiceovers in the trailers are heavily muted, in some trailers I can't hear dialogue at all. The "background" audio is quite loud, while dialogue is almost non-existant it's so quiet. I have the codec pack installed with the exact same settings on both my desktop and laptop, and any one of the files plays fine on my desktop, then has the audio issue if I copy that exact file to my laptop.

Things I have tried:
Reinstalling the sound driver on my laptop (it's a Dell Inspiron 6000)
Uninstalling and reinstalling the Mega Codec Pack, with the same version as on my desktop and with different versions
Installing Quicktime alternative both by itself, then installing the rest of the codec pack, and installing it with the codec pack
Downloading a newer version of ffdshow and installing that seperately
I have not changed any settings within Media Player Classic, since I didn't on my PC

Does anyone have any ideas? This is driving me crazy

I hope that you have better luck with this forum than what I have had so far. I have posted a problem I do not know how many times and one gal did try to help but then somehow the thread got lost and no one has been of any help for me at all with codecs so good luck Sandy D

Okay, got it. At the bottom of the installation options dialog, there is an option to select the number of speakers in the system. It is not selected by default. However, when I select it and choose 2 speakers (only 2 on the laptop), the sound is balanced correctly.