wmplayer.exe 100% CPU usage

nobodythere

I'm out of ideas on this one. Windows Media Player goes full throttle to 100% whenever a song is played, and stays there forever. Even when I close it the process stays active at 100%.

This doesn't happen in other media players (Winamp namely), so it's not the sound card.

I've tried rolling it back to WMP9, tried upgrading it to 11, even deleted the whole folder from Program Files and reinstalled - no dice muthafscka.

Also scanned with Spybot, Ad-aware and AVG, cleaned some crap off but nothing relevant.

There are no active plugins.

Any ideas?

Kevster

This is a long-shot but do you have visualisations turned-on? They are in the 'View' drop-down menu.

nobodythere

They're off, in fact in this new media player I can't even figure out how to turn them on. This has only been a recent development, no upgrades involved (though now that I'm thinking I'm sure there have been a number of security updates to it probably).

Kevster

Hmmm, personally I've never encountered it. I'm sure someone else here has though. It could possibly be nothing to do with Media Player, directly. There are some viruses that hijack normal processes as their own. ie, a virus names itself wmplayer.exe and in effect masks itself.

So, have you up-to-date spyware stuff? Check your Windows start-up processes and look for something out of the ordinary. HiJackThis is a program that I use - it has never failed me whenever I get a nasty virus on the computer.


Kevster.

8T8

Try setting ffdshow as your audio decoder for MP3/WMA/AAC and see what happens when you play that content in WMP.

By default it should take over decoding those formats if it doesn't go into the ffdshow start menu program group and run the audio decoder configuration then enable support for whichever ones you want.

Moe Lester

i had the same problem.

played a song and it would just go all the way up the charts in task manager using 100% of my two cpu's.

was really anoying cause my laptop was just a basic pentium 4 laptop and it ran fine on it.

also installed ffdshow aswell like what 8t8 was saying.

here is what i did.

i first rolled it back to windows 10 then restarted the computer.

then downloaded a new installed of windows media player 11(just incase my installation was infected some how.

after install i restarted my computer and it is running fine now never goes high at all and i have visualisations on aswell and tried them in full screen it worked fine.

p.s i also made sure i didnt have to many folders in the Add to Library part.

Basically the more folders you have the more process speed is need to search for them i just have the one music folder added and it works fine.

Hope this helps.

joker77

Hey

Thought I'd resurrect this thread rather than starting a new one on the same topic - I'm having the same problem, and in fact I just don't like the new Windows Media player - what's the best way to roll back to the previous version?

nobodythere

Still having this problem, installed FFDShow, removed most of the library. It's the same whether you're watching video or audio, even before you play anything at all.

To roll it back go into add/remove programs and when you try to remove it it will just roll it back.

Kevster

Did you recently install XP Service Pack 2? When I installed that there were problems with various programs on my computer. To get them working again I ended-up having to reinstall windows, followed by the service packs, and then all of my other programs. Only then did the problems disappear.


Kevin.


Edit: With the Automatic Downloads from MS it is best to control what is downloaded yourself. New doenloads are available at the start of every month which is when I check. Be careful what you choose because there are so many compatibility issues.

nobodythere

Could be from installing SP2, I had some other issues with it.

I think I'll just give up and reinstall windows anyway.

joker77

I tried rolling back to version 10, no problems.

I accidentally clicked yes to update it so I let it go through to see what would happen, same thing - when version 11 ran it ate up the CPU and even if you closed Media player the wmplayer.exe was up at 99% CPU.

I haven't recently installed SP2, was quite a long time ago

I've rolled back to version 10 again