wmpnetwork.exe service clogs CPU usage

We have remote locations each with 2 ASUS media extenders that stream from a computer with a shared Media Player library. Lately, several of these locations experience the "wmpnetwork.exe" service throttling the CPU to 100% usage. Killing the service only results in it starting back up, and so far the only temporary solution is to uninstall Media Player. A lot of these computers are also about 3-5 years old. Could it just be a case of outdated hardware not being able to do everything we ask them to do? Edit: all running Windows XP and Windows Media Player 11

Brenton Taylor

Posted 2010-10-11T12:12:30.313

Reputation: 573

Answers

We've determined that likely it was a result of outdated hardware. We were asking these PC's to do too much and we haven't been through an upgrade cycle in a while. Installing new hardware has fixed this issue.

Brenton Taylor

Posted 2010-10-11T12:12:30.313

Reputation: 573

Why not just disable the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service on the clients that are having this issue? This service only needs to be running on the machine with the shared library.

Nick

Posted 2010-10-11T12:12:30.313

Reputation: 981

The only clients that are having the issue are the ones that have the shared library and need to stream the media – Brenton Taylor – 2010-10-11T13:10:53.113

Is it not possible to move the libraries to some other PC? @Brenton – Sathyajith Bhat – 2010-10-11T15:54:33.520

We can move the libraries to another PC, however we prefer to keep them on the same PC's we set them up on to mirror our other location's setup – Brenton Taylor – 2010-10-11T15:59:27.620

There is probably nothing wrong with the hardware. Try uninstalling media player from the Windows components in control panel and the remote differential compression service.

Restart computer and restart media player and remote compression service. This will hopefully re-configure corrupted media player and stop it cycling and using all your resources.

If when you re-enable media player the problem returns you will have to use an alternate media player until next version upgrade

BigED

Posted 2010-10-11T12:12:30.313

Reputation: 11