Recently, both my Windows 7 computers with Media Center on them stopped updating the TV listings correctly. I found out that Windows media Center has a warning system: if you have less than three days of TV listings you will get a pop-up box that tells you that: that’s a good feature.

The first thing to do is to try to download the guide listings manually. You can do that by going into Tasks, TV, Guide, Get Latest Guide Listings.  I tried numerous times over a couple of days.

In my case, even a manual download would report as successful, however, the listings would not be any closer to a full set. Just today, the listings were going to expire tomorrow morning.

Next, I tried re-acquiring the TV signal. you can do that by going into tasks, TV, TV signal, SET UP TV Signal. In the past I have done this and reacquiring the TV signal brought a full set of downloaded TV listings. Once, I had to change the zip – go to another ZIP code in my area that got the same channels for this process to work.

I started scouring forums for people with my same problem, however, I couldn’t find anyone reporting that their listings were going to expire tomorrow. That means that the problem was something unique to my setups.  So I read what people had tried in the past for this problem.

The next thing I tried was going into task scheduler. you can do that by typing Task Scheduler in the run dialog box in the start menu. in the Task Scheduler Library Window, click on the Microsoft note, Windows node, then the Media Center node. The task window is center top. find the ObjectStoreRecoveryTask. Right-click on that, and click Run.

It took a good 5 min. for that to run. but after it did I reopened Windows Media Center, and voilà, the listings were updated.

If this didn’t work i had another tack to try, but it is a last resort.  You can remove Media Center from Windows in Programs and Features in Control Panel, and reinstall everything.  So far I haven’t had to do that.