Bars on sides while watching widescreen movies?

Just recently while watching non anamorphic widescreen dvd's in my xa2 I have black bars on the sides as well as the top and bottom. I'm not new to this and understand the bars on the top and bottom, but as of late my 42" panasonic plasma is a 32". I've had this tv for almost 2 years. Could it be that I have never watched an non anamorphic widescreen dvd until now? It seems like every other film I watch lately has these bars. I'm just guessing that the non anamorphic is the problem. I recently watched 'Lethal Weapon' in non anamorphic and had the bars, just on a hunch I stuck in 'Undercover Brother' with anamorphic widescreen and the bars disappeared. I've set the xa2 output to 16:9 and set my tv to the correct setting. Is there something I'm missing? Or is this a problem I've never come across until now? I have a hard time believing that by chance all this time I've never played a non anamorphic widescreen movie. Any help or suggestions would be very appreciated. Thanks in advance.

The 'problem' is that the XA2 pillarboxes 4:3 content correctly, so that's why you suddenly see the black bars on the sides of non-anamorphic movies. Non anamorphic is just 4:3 letterbox content with black bars on the top and bottom. You should notice that regular 4:3 tv shows should look much better than before because the XA2 not only pillarboxes them (shows them in their original 4:3 format while upscaling) but upscales them very well.

The best way to view non-anamorphic material upscaled is to zoom the picture to fill your screen, but if your HDTV doesn't allow you to do this while in HDMI mode (many won't), then you'll have to reduce the resolution to 480p before zooming, or just watch the movie upscaled with the black bars on all 4 sides.

Thanks for the reply. I have owned the xa2 for 2 years and have never noticed this until recently. I didn't know if it was a firmware update or what. What you said makes perfect sense, I guess I have been fortunate enough not to have seen nonanamorphic widescreen films until the last few weeks. I will use the 'zoom' from now on (it works) I just never thought about doing that. I was always curious as to why someone would use 'zoom'. Thanks again.