Since he already has a seperate DVD player in his room, I told him to not worry about it. Just use the PS2 for playing games (so far every game has worked in it), and use the stand-alone DVD player for his movies. He still kept nagging about wanting to play DVDs in the game machine. I finally got tired of his constant nagging about the damn thing, and told him if he didn't shut up about it, I was going to box the machine up, and take it back to the store and get my money back! He's now in his room crying...
UPDATE: After a friend sent a message with links to a couple of online articles, and trying the things in those articles, we determined it wasn't "parental settings" after all. There's apparently a flaw in the "Van Helsing" DVD he was trying to play. We put in an R-rated DVD, no prompt. Put in another PG-13, again no prompt. THEN, Andrew tells me, when he was living with his mother, they had the same DVD, and it did the same thing in her PS2 (WHY he didn't tell me that earlier, I have no clue!). Guess it's Universal and their craptacular disc quality showing its ugly head again...
/have had more problems with Universal DVD's than any other studio...