Windows Media Centre losing settings

[Beagle-eye]

I recently upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 and now whenever I start up Windows Media Centre (WMC) it has lost the library of music and takes about 20 minutes to recreate it. It’s a real pain as it takes up so much resource that I can’t even load the task manager to see what is happening

I’ve done some Google searches and the only “solution” which seems to be posted is to put the PC into “Hibernate” rather than switch it off. If this fixes it then that is what I will do but I am curious.....

Has anybody else experienced this ? Does anybody have any idea why it happens and, most importantly, is there a solution ?

Thanks

B-E

[Sprogget]

It is a well known issue in Media centre, which in my opinion, is the only thing that has not been fixed from xp through Vista to 7mc. Have a look at the link below, there are various suggestions on fixing it - one that has worked for me is to boot up the box, load mce & then go into music & let the library load completely before touching anything within it. My own library contains 1200 or so albums & loads within 2 minutes, but i still think it should be instantly available.

Search - The Green Button

[SamTHorn]

I recently had a similar problem on my XP. It turned out to be a operating system update which I unloaded and reinstalled and all is well now. Just a thought.

~ Sam

[Beagle-eye]

Thanks for the responses.

I was checking that all drivers etc. were up to date and what I noticed was that I had two folders both called "My Music". One contained all of my music whilst the other contained a few MP3 files which I had recently downloded from Amazon.

It seems that Windows 7 automatically created a new "My Music" folder to hold the downloaded files from Amazon and it was this folder that Windows Media Centre was going to for its files. Finding nothing in it, WMC then looked at other locations and rebuilt a library of music which it promptly lost when the machine was powered off.

I also notivced that when I deleted this folder, W7 automatically recreated it.

I copied all of my music from "my" My Music folder into the W7 My Music folder and, hey presto, WMC now works

Closer inspection also reveiled 2 "My Pictures" folders which I also sorted out in the same way.

I suspect that the problem is due to the fact that I upgraded from Vista to W7 and, even though there were existing My Music and My Picture folders, the upgrade created duplicates which it regarded as the master folders.

Thanks again

B-E