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Thread: Removing windows media player from windows vista

  1. #1
    Gold Member twinscythe12332's Avatar
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    Removing windows media player from windows vista

    Hey everyone,

    I've been having problems with windows media player for a while. For those of you who don't already know, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided that windows media player needs to remain constantly active (after either sp1 or sp2), from startup. Coupled with this is an apparent issue in the way they handle instances of WMPlayer.exe (ie, they only like to have one). This tends to suck a lot when you're trying to play a file and that wonderful windows media player screen doesn't show up. and even better when you click the close button and the song keeps playing, even though the window has gone away.
    Anyway, if any of you are having an issue with it and haven't found much help online (like me), there's a quick and fairly painless removal process.
    PLEASE NOTE: If you're running dreamscene, it is probably advisable that you keep WMPlayer.
    The way to disable it is:
    -Start up in safemode (by pressing F8 during the bios screen).
    -go to your local drive C:/program files/
    -find windows media player.
    -move it to another folder elsewhere
    -once it has moved, restart.

    Voila! you have just removed windows media player. broken shortcuts will exist, so if you're so inclined, run a cleanup procedure to get rid of them.

    Now you're able to replace it with something like winamp for music and VLC media player for videos. If you ever have any issues, you can either download WMP again and install, or copy the folder over (in safe mode) to its original place (this won't work after the cleanup has deleted registry entries and the likes).

    Hope this helps

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    Diamond Member AndyD's Avatar
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    Relocating, deleting or renaming files can cause unstability as well as slowing the OS down whilst it tries to locate them. Can't you go into msconfig from a run box and disable the startup entry for wmp from there? You might need to be logged in as a true administrator with Vista to do this.

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    Gold Member twinscythe12332's Avatar
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    you misunderstand what I was trying to do. Remove it from my system entirely.

    I haven't had any hampered performance since doing this on two PCs.

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    Gold Member irneb's Avatar
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    This sounds a lot like that problem with Messenger! Yet another M$ proggy which infiltrates itself profusely!

    I've just noticed it's reasserted itself after an update from M$ ... ... now where was that removal instructions again?
    Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves. - Norm Franz
    And central banks are the slave clearing houses

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