I’ve had a number of issues playing WMA and WMV files the last couple of months. Both direct loading as well as streaming. It just loaded, then the status said ready! There was an error saying something like “protocol not supported” as well. Today I had it, when I missed the high jump final of the world championships in athletic in Osaka (instead I had to work)

So, with some trial and error I managed to correct it… it really took some hours ZzzzZzzz: This is what I did:

I logged in to the system as another (untouched) user. This user had no problem playing the files, meaning there is some user setting that have gone havoc. OK, back to my ordinary account.

Windows Media Player seams to store its settings in the following locations:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer, and in
• %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Media\11.0

To see where the corruption is, I renamed each of the folders in order. After each renaming I started WMP and tested its functionality. Don’t worry, these folders are recreated when the application runs. OK, WMP pops up its initialization dialog.

The fault seamed to be in the second location. I just removed the renamed folder, and now I’m happy