Suddenly my computer was impossibly slow, my recorded shows were stilted and out of sync. I checked task manager and my CPU usage was 100%.

The first thing is to evaluate if there is something that has recently changed on the computer, and I had just added a 5 Tb USB WD Elements HD to store tv recordings from Windows Media Center. In doing so I added media locations to the setup in Windows Media Center.

I followed the following procedures to get my CPU usage back to normal. The first of the two issues was that Windows Media Center was indexing a whole lot of folders that it didn’t need to so the first procedure removes those. The second issue was that the Media Player Network service that makes media files available to other Players on other computers was running rampant and so I stopped and disabled that service.

For the first procedure:

In Windows Media Player click Organize and then click Manage Libraries.  Click on each of the four libraries one at a time. Remove any locations that aren’t directly involved with that particular media. For example, on my computer the location D:\ was found on two media. That means that that whole drive was being indexed for those media instead of just the folders that contained the media files.

For the second procedure:

Open Services. One way to open it is to open task manager. (Right click on the task bar and select Task Manager) . In Task Manager click the Services tab, then in the lower right corner slick the Services button.

In services turn off the “WMPnetwk.exe” service by double clicking on it. Then double click on startup type and change to Disabled. You can try to stop the service but it failed in my case

Restart your computer.

When I did this my computer CPU usage was better and my computer was much quicker.

However, the situation was not completely resolved.

Not long after I did the above actions, Media center became intermittently unresponsive.  It was nowhere the stilted performance that it was, but it was still problematic.

Checking Task Manager again, I found wmplayer.exe using 50% CPU.  At first I just killed the process, but not long after that I found wmplayer.exe still using 50% CPU even when Media Player of Media Center weren’t running!  And, of course, the problem is Media Center would stop responding to commands from the remote control or the mouse.

Next I found a windows forum that suggested deleting the library database files as they may contain old references that are calling Media Player to index old locations.

Delete The Library Database File

Library database files are located in your user profile.  In Windows Explorer browse your way to:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player.

Delete all the files that end in .wmdb.  After you restart Windows Media Player (or Media Center) they will be recreated.  %UserProfile% is the location of your user profile, so in my case it was C:/Users/Mark.

I found 25 files that ended in .wmdb!  After I deleted these I went back in and found that Windows had recreated just 6 .wmdb files so 19 of those 25 weren’t helping.