XL201 keeps Freezing when I look at My Music library

[andysp5]

I have an intermittent problem with my XL201. I can go into My Music and look around and sometimes it works, but about 50% of the time, it just freezes. The whole PC freezes and I have to reboot. I have about 250 albums on there (which is not a HUGE number).
According to Windows Update, all drivers are up to date and I have no viruses.
It only seems to freeze in My Music and not Videos or Pictures or TV.
Any ideas anybody?
Andy

[rich912]

Hi Andy,

Are you using Windows Explorer to browse the music files or a media player such as WMP or iTunes?

If the problem occurs using Windows Explorer then I suspect that you have a corrupt file in the folder, although I am not sure why this would be an intermittent problem.

Have a look in Event Viewer (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > System) – look for any red or yellow warning symbols that have a time stamp of the same time as the freeze.

[andysp5]

Hi Rich,
I'm using MCE and that is what freezes.
Had a look at those logs and there is not a single yellow or red message.
I ran MCE again just 10mins ago, and again after browsing My Music for a couple of minutes, it froze. I did a CTRL-ALT-DEL and it showed just MCE as the application running, but in processes, it had a process called ehshell.exe using about 50% of the cpu usage, even though the XL201 was doing nothing.
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks, Andy

[rich912]

I really don’t have any idea what the problem is at the moment Andy. Are there any warning messages in the application log (as opposed to system log)?

[andysp5]

I Looked at all the logs and there were no errors.
And it's not only My Music that it freezes on, it just froze in My Videos.
What is interesting is that it NEVER freezes whilst playing music or watching videos, it only ever freezes when in the index part and scrolling up and down the list of music or videos.
It's actually becoming unusable now.
Are there any alternatives to MCE? I've heard about something called Wizd?
Andy

[andysp5]

Well I tried 2 system restores and neither fixed my problem. I then took the drastic step of doing a complete system recovery and reloading all my media. It now works.
However, previously, I had downloaded just 2 extra pieces of software from non-standard VAIO, and they were WMP11 and some DivX codecs. I have not downloaded those this time, and it works so far.
Therefore, I wonder if there is an incompatibility somewhere?
I know that in the future, I am not downloading anything that isn't absolutely necessary, and if I do, making a restore point before I do.

[rich912]

Hi Andy,

I’m sorry that I missed your previous post.

I would guess that it was WMP11 that caused the problem

I'm pleased to hear that you have it sorted now

[ChalkyWhite71]

If it occurs again it may be worth trashing your music library in WMP, which is where MCE gets your PC's music info from. By killing off the library (and NOT the files), you can then rebuild the WMP library, then try reloading MCE to see if the freezing still occurs.

I wonder if it's something like a ID3 tag (e.g. bit rate, artist, album etc) which contains unexpected characters or similar? This has caused problems in the past with a program I use in my bar called SK Jukebox, which interprets ID3 tags as it builds the music library.

[andysp5]

I did actually delete the whole library in WMP11, and then when I went into MCE05, it showed no media in library. Then I went into WMP11 and let it restore the library, but when I went into MCE05, it froze.
I'm now using WMP10, have edited the library using WMP10, and when I go into MCE05 now, it shows the change correctly.
Is there an incompatibility between WMP11 and MCE05?