I'm trialing the 'WMV to AVI MPEG DVD WMV Converter' V1.2.2 from Allok
Soft. But so far I have not been able to succeed with it.

I'm trying to convert a 3.9 MB WMV file. It's accessible here, for a
few days anyway (I'm at the limit of my free web space!):
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Images/LED-Sequencer4MB.wmv

It's one of my first I've made with MS Windows Movie Maker 2.0.
(Content is irrelevant; it's for discussion in one of the specialist
electronics newsgroups.) The WMV plays fine in WMP, IrfanView, Nero
ShowTime, Real Player, and PowerDVD.

The reason I'm trying to convert it anyway is that one person in the
electronics group said the WMV wouldn't play in his WMP. No idea why
(surely that's the 'native' format for WMP?), but I thought I'd offer
him an AVI and MPG as well.

But after conversion to either AVI or MPG there are a variety of
errors.

For example, converting to MPG, I open the WMV, then:
For Output Format I select MPEG-II. I leave other settings at their
defaults.

After clicking Convert, I get a file led-sequencer4mb_tompeg2.mpg

If I play this (it's associated with WMP9 here) the 'spinning' text
effect is 'frozen'. If I choose MPEG-I instead, I get some of the
spinning back, but it's still not faithful to the original. Not sure
if the proportions are right either.

For AVI, leaving the settings at their defaults, it's much worse.
Using the defaults, the conversion plainly doesn't work because it's
too fast and the file is a mere 127 KB. Clicking it to play it in WMP
fails to run it, and I get I get a message about an unexpected error.
In Quicktime, nothing at all happens.

I repeated that with various different settings for the AVI. But
frankly I don't have a clue about choosing from those long lists of
codecs. So far I haven't found one, but I'm hoping that there is a
combination there that will work that someone here can suggest please?

BTW, is this program intended only for those who are deep into the
technicalities of video? Is there an alternative (ideally freeware!)
that a mere end-user can get results with?