Windows Media player 9 causing Explorer.exe to max out CPU?

Last night I was watching a video using the latest Windows Media player in Windows XP. The video was VERY choppy and I noticed my CPU was being very slow.

I opened Task Manager and Explorer.exe was eating up at least 115,000k of memory and the CPU was holding steady at 80-90%. Fearing the worst (virus), I immediately disconnected the DSL and locked down the connection w/Zone Alarm. I rebooted and opened the video in Winamp and everything seemed normal again. I ran a virus scan over night and found nothing.

I typically don't use Windows Media player, but I've never seen this problem before. Anyone else? Almost seems as if something got caught in a processing loop from which there was no escape.

looks like your PC is pretty messed up. Run>msconfig>startup and uncheck the unnecessary programs.

loks said:

looks like your PC is pretty messed up. Run>msconfig>startup and uncheck the unnecessary programs.

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Yep. Its been really quirky the last few days. I have no idea what's going on. I'll try MSconfig again.

Sounds like you have the famous explorer bug error that has been plaguing me and some other users in the forum for some time. Do you use any file sharing programs? Where is this file located that you are trying to play? Is it the same file? It might be corrupted, or you might have another file in the same folder that might be corruppted. That's my only idea on the matter. I have to ctrl-alt-delete to get explorer usage back to normal, but if I browse the folders w/ the corrupted files, it shoots back up. If you find a solution, please post / PM me. Thanks

- Awperator

Awperator said:

Sounds like you have the famous explorer bug error that has been plaguing me and some other users in the forum for some time. Do you use any file sharing programs? Where is this file located that you are trying to play? Is it the same file? It might be corrupted, or you might have another file in the same folder that might be corruppted. That's my only idea on the matter. I have to ctrl-alt-delete to get explorer usage back to normal, but if I browse the folders w/ the corrupted files, it shoots back up. If you find a solution, please post / PM me. Thanks

- Awperator

Click to expand...

I'm using eMule and iMesh Lite. I was viewing a file in my downloads folder for iMesh when this occurred. I checked, and there appear to be a few corrupt files that I cannot delete in that folder

If I so much as click on the file, this issue seems to occur. I think I might try disabling the preview pane in Explorer (I'm assuming this can be done) and see if I can then delete the file.

It's definetly the preview pane - I have seen this before.

What you should do is press windows+r, type cmd and hit enter, then navigate to the directory where the file resides and use the del command to delete the files - it will ask you for confirmation.