Media Center Crashes When Scrolling Recorded TV

[prje]

I ran into a strange situation causing media center to crash when scrolling through recorded TV. When scrolling through the recorded TV listings, occasionally hitting a recorded show would cause media center to crash and restart. This only happened when scrolling from left to right. If I scrolled into the recorded show that caused the crash from the top or the bottom it was no problem. I could open the show, play it, delete it, with no problems. If I deleted the show that was causing the crash the problem would then move to some other show somewhere else in the listing. The problem occurred on the main PC, my Linksys extender, and my Xbox 360 extender. I have been using media center since 2005 and never experienced this problem before. I'm currently running Windows 7 with all the latest patches.

Fixes I tried that did not work:
- Deleting the problem show just caused the problem to move to some other show in the listing.
- I tried deleting all shows that were recorded on and after the time the problem started. That did not help.
- Deleted the thmb files in the programdata/microsoft/ehome directory, that did not help.
- Did a system restore to a point before the problem started, that did not help.

What I did to finally fix it:
After searching around I found references in Microsoft trouble tickets stating that you can delete the programdata/microsoft/ehome directory and it will re-create itself when you restart media center. Here are the steps I took:
1. Copy the programdata/microsoft/ehome directory to a place to save it just in case.
2. Take a snapshot of everything you have set for series recordings.
3. Reboot in safe mode (hit F8 while your system is booting to get the start menu and select safe mode).
4. Delete everything under the programdata/microsoft/ehome directory. Leave the ehome directory in place since it has some special access rights on it.
5. Reboot and restart media center
6. You'll have to run media center TV set up again. This meant I had to edit my guide listings since I delete a lot of duplicate channels. That was kind of a pain for me.
7. Recreate your series recordings.

That is all you have to reconfigure. All recordings remained intact, the extenders remained configured and connected as usual. Music, pictures, videos, addins remained intact.

Have no idea what file was actually causing the problem. Most likely the mcepg2-0.db but not positive.

[spanner]

interesting, Today my media center also crashed on me while watching a recorded episode of Flash. happened three different times while skipping forward through commercials at different spots in the same show. Each time I would get a windows message asking if i wanted to restart Media center. I realize this is a different scenario than your issue but I also have never had media center crash on me. Will look into it more in the morning.