Which version of PowerDVD? I bought v6 a month ago and downloaded a 30MB patch that fixed quite a few issues.
Perhaps the screen on your laptop is too slow to not have ghosting issues. Maybe your screen resolution is wrong. If you go the fullscreen route, PowerDVD has to adjust everything to fit... and it looks less than great compared to the natural 700-something by 400-something native playback resolution.
Tom