microsoft, multimedia, software

Windows Media Center madness

9 Comments

I use Windows Vista Media Center with a digital TV card. It had been working fine for a year, until last week.

Then it started playing up. Browsing TV recordings would raise an error: “A critical Windows Media Center process has failed. Please restart the computer and try again.” In addition, one particular TV program was reported as still recording, days after it had ended. Nothing was being written to the drive, but nothing else would record.

Needless to say, restarting the computer fixed nothing. For all the song and dance about self-healing applications, Windows Error Reporting, and the rest of it, the reality is that Google searches and fiddling with the registry and configuration files often remains the only way to fix things.

After a couple of a false trails, I found the help I wanted on the Green Button site. Stop the Media Center services, delete the files recording.xml and recording.bak in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording, restart Media Center. All is fine, except that any existing recording schedules are lost.

A small price for domestic harmony.

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9 thoughts on “Windows Media Center madness”

  3. Thank-you soooo much … this happened to me for the second time about 4 weeks ago and I had to reinstall after the first time it happened, this has just saved me a whole heap of trouble ! I’ve not done anything with it since because I wanted to find an easy solution as reinstalling every 2 weeks was not going to happen.

    Again many thanks.

    Tom

  5. I’d like to say thanks too!

    I’ve had VIsta working for six months without a problem and then suddenley 2 days ago this error appeared. I had tried all the other “fixes” to no avail, this one worked. So simple and no re-build required.

    Thanks

    X

  7. Thanks for the simpe solution.

    Have been looking for the same problem for some time now. Was about to do a reinstallation as last “solution”.

    Now the childrens recordings are setup again, and things looks like it is working.

    Best regards,
    Morten

  8. Thanks this sorted me out.. why don’t they make a fix or this?? i used the search thing on windows vista to find the files to delete!!

  9. THANKS!

    Also had Vista Media Center running for some time with no problems, then I got this error.

    From the vista log, it could be related to a program that has its broadcast date changed by the program supplyer. It started about the same time. This change gave manny strange logs, after the change was issued.

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