Bug in Embedded Windows Media Player

[gbrown]

Here's a weird one... I barter yard cleanup with a buddy of mine who has a lawn service. He picks up brush, I muck out his computers. He popped by this morning with his HP notebook... the audio had ceased to operate. It took me about an hour and a half and I finally narrowed it down to the embedded media player on the MSNBC site. The audio worked great until then... I could launch Media Player and play WMA files or whatever without a hitch. As soon as I went to the MSNBC site and tried to play a new story..WHAMO...no audio. It doesn't even see the audio player any more, "No Device" kind of error.

A tech buddy at a customer site said that he'd heard of some audio driver problems that got introduced when Microsoft sent out their animated icon "fix" last week. My bud is running XP SP2 with all other fixes.

Anyone else heard / experienced this?

Gary

[Worm]

is the audio system RealTek?

[gbrown]

Not sure... it's a newer HP notebook. I applied a hot-fix from Microsoft that was SUPPOSED to fix things, but no luck.

gcb

[Worm]

I only ask because within the last week, I've had some machines that started whining about Realtek drivers taking the reserved memory space of the User32.dll as its own. I've got it cleared up now, but it took a bit of hocus-pocus to do it.

[gbrown]

What was your hocus-pocus... other than the usual chicken sacrifice and all that?

[Worm]

I had to rename some files, and create empty ones that were read only, then re-install the drive.

[rhosk]

We also have a discussion about this very issue here