Windows Media Center opens up by itself sometimes

Question

Windows Media Center opens up by itself sometimes. How can I stop this from happening? I don't even use this program at all.

It just comes up full screen with no apparent trigger. No keyboard shortcuts that I know of.

Answer 1

Haha, guess what! After 5 years I actually know how to make it happen intentionally!

The keystroke to cause Windows Media Center to appear is Windows+Alt+Enter.

As for how to disable it? Just look at the other answers I guess.

Now, it does seem strange to me that I never figured this out before (on my previous computer) so it's possible that a keyboard malfunction can cause this, but I'll never know for sure if it was that, or an actual typo on my part originally.

Answer 2

There are a couple of things I've seen cause this:

Multimedia keys on the keyboard - if your keyboard has multimedia keys, some of them may launch MCE. With some keyboards it is easy to hit these by accident.

Remote control receiver - I have an MCE remote control receiver attached to my PC. Pressing certain buttons on my universal remote (the ones you would expect, but also others like the "Info" button) causes MCE to open up. Some laptops have receivers built in, so this might apply to you even if you don't think it should.

Check for command line parameters to ehshell.exe. Not sure if any are passed to MCE but might give you a clue. Since you're running Windows Vista, you can see the command line right in the Task Manager. View menu -> Select columns -> check "Command Line."

Answer 3

I have it too sometimes. In the three years I have Windows 7, it happened to me maybe 4 times.

I don't have a remote control or media keys.

At first, I thought it might be some weird shortcut I accidentally pressed, but this last time this couldn't have been the case. I was watching a video in mplayer classic (which I've been doing every day for the past few years), went to the toilet, came back and pressed space (the play/pause key). After a few seconds, media center popped up full screen, made noises, all while my video was playing. It even changed my screen resolution to something higher than it used to be.

I tried the trick for turning off windows features, but I won't know if it's effective until I reboot, which might be months from now.

For future research, These processes were found, with these parameters:

1 "C:\Windows\eHome\EhTray.exe" /nav:-2

2 "C:\Windows\eHome\EHShell.exe" /homepage:Home.xml /prefetch:0

3 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe" /SkipFUE /RemoteOCXLaunch /SuppressDialogs

3 was a child process of 2.

Answer 4

The following information was found here.

Have you gone to Programs and Features and uninstalled and reinstalled Windows Media Player?

Uninstalling and Reinstalling the Windows Media Player:

Step 1. Uninstalling the Windows Media Player:

1. Go to Start and in the search type "Turn Windows features On or Off".

2. Click on "Turn Windows features On or Off".

3. Browse to the Media Features and uncheck the mark in front of Windows Media Player.

4. Restart the computer

Step 2. Reinstalling the Windows Media Player:

1. Go to Start and in the search type "Turn Windows features On or Off".

2. Click on "Turn Windows features On or Off".

3. Browse to the Media Features and place a check mark in front of Windows Media Player.

4. Restart the Computer.

If you are having trouble using Windows Media Player, try using the troubleshooter to see if that fixes the problem.

Open the Windows Media Player Settings troubleshooter by clicking theStart button, and then clicking Control Panel. In the search box, typetroubleshooter, and then click Troubleshooting. ClickView all, and then click Windows Media Player Settings.

Also, people in the forum posted that they were using the Razer Lacosa keyboard. If you are also using this, it may be an issue with the keyboard. I would just uninstall Windows Media Player if you don't use it, just to save time.

-Good Luck!

Answer 5

In my case it was the keyboard.

The keyboard had multimedia buttons and every now and then it would cause media player to randomly start, without even touching it.
The keyboard was quite old and I assume the dirt inside it would cause sporadic contact between its internal printed circuit sheets.

The way I discovered this was by plugging the keyboard into another computer, and similarly, media player started to randomly pop up.
Who would have thought.

Answer 6

I have the same problem, it seems to be connected to a keyboard shortcut for me, but I cant figure out which one—whatever it is I hit it about once a month when coding in visual studio/resharper. It always seems to happen in and around Ctrl/Shift/Alt/Windows key or some combination of these and possibly the space bar or some character around s on the keyboard.

Having real trouble figuring out what shortcut it is—because it takes a while to load I often dont know exactly when I've triggered it. Didnt even know what the program was to start with—I've never used Windows Media center in my life—thought it was a 'Get Started' screen for Windows Media Player or something. Think everytime its happened I've had WMP open.

Im using windows 7. Found this article which looked promising; however I checked the shortcut and found it was set to none, so I'm a bit stumped.

I solved this problem by uninstalling media center by going: Control Panel=> Programs and Features => Turn Windows Features on or Off (left hand panel). Not an ideal fix maybe but ok if you never use the program.