How I Fixed My wmplayer.exe Always Running on Vista Issues
This has been going on for a while. The symptoms were:
- Windows Media Player (wmplayer.exe) was running on boot, not visible of course, even after creating a new account
- Sometimes when playing an MP3 with WMP it would play, but when losing the WMP window the mp3 would continue playing (and wmplayer.exe would still run)
- Sometimes MP3s playing die off after 10 or 20 seconds
- This happens even though "media watching" is turned off in WMP
With a bit of help from Dana I figured out that wmplayer.exe was being run via mobsync.exe. Going to All Programs -> Accessories -> Sync Center opens up the Mobil Sync Center. Even though I had nothing set up under "View Sync Partnerships", going into the 'set up new sync partnerships' on the lefthand menu I found that my SDHC card reader and my USB key were in there.
Now my assumption was that if I didn't set up something, it would leave them alone, however if you right click on each device in the list and go to "Setup" (WMP will pop up for some reason or other) and then un-check the sync this device automatically option.
After doing this for each device listed and rebooting, I found I didn't have my wmplayer.exe issues anymore! Wooo!
So it looks like Vista is trying to be really helpful, and preemptively getting WMP ready to sync up any new devices you plug in. This means that on boot it sees the device, runs WMP to watch the media or whatever it's doing, and there for the slug that is WMP is running all the time for you (no, I'm not saying that iTunes isn't a beast as well).
Hope this helps someone out there, I searched to find how to fix this to no avail before.
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Awesome, I've been trying to track down the cause of this myself. Another very annoying side effect (at least for me) is when you double click a media file to launch media player, the file plays but the window doesn't pop-up. Really something MS needs to fix. Thanks for the solution!
Thank you!! After searching through the internet for this, finally there's a sensible answer, and it works!
If anyone who read this also have the Windows Media Player processes wmpnscfg.exe and wmpnetwk.exe running in the memory, go here and follow the steps to get rid of them: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/what-are-wmpnscfgexe-and-wmpnetwkexe-and-why-are-they-running/
The item I found under my "setup partnerships" list was "Offline Files". I disabled the "Offline Files" service in service manager, since I don't use it, and poof the problem is completely gone.