Another malfunctioning ATI software

I used an ati pci tuner card a few years back for a long time and was very
pleased with it. Now I live off a notebook in school and bought the usb tv
tuner to watch TV on the notebook (a dell - 8months old) for the extreme
boredoms.

Everything installed alright, drivers, software, no problems. The problem is
the ati tv tuner software. If I load the tv program I get the error:

The TV player failed to initialize the video. Ensure the correct video
drivers have been installed and close any applications which may be playing
video such as DVD or WebTV before attempting to restart TV.

I searched literally hundreds of google and google group pages with no luck
to fix the software. Total uninstall, removed *all* remains of ati files,
reinstalled directx, video drivers, used the cd software and latest from the
ati website, none work. No other video capturing or remote sharing programs
being used.

I know it is the software because I loaded virtualdub and within vdub I
could see the video of a channel. So I know the tuner works and it sends the
video to my notebook, but the ati software is bunk. How can I fix the ati
software? Any help would be greatly appreciated, else next week this thing
is going back and I will swear off ATI for the rest of my computing days.

thanks to all
brian