Although the Applian player is a good working player, it's pretty much the same as several other freeware players. After searching for 2 or 3 days, I finally stumbled on a full featured freeware media player, that gives smooth full-screen playback, and I hope posting this will help someone so they won't waste the time I did searching. It has several parameters that can be tweaked, and if if doesn't work on your machine you may need to tweak one of those parameters. For instance, by default it used the wrong video output driver (changing to directx-fast solved this problem). Check it out:

http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/