Media Player intermittently hangs

First time system builder here so be easy on me.

I built a system with the following components:
Core2 Duo E7500
Intel DG45ID
4GB DDR2 800
1-TB Western Digital Caviar Green SATA
Sony Optiarc 7240 SATA
Thermaltake 500W ATX12V 2.2
CoolerMaster 330 case

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Here is the problem. When I first launch WMP, it seems to play files fine, but after a while sometimes video will freeze and it won't recover. I shutdown WMP and relaunching may bring WMP back but the window 'circle' will forever signal its waiting for something when you click on one of the WMP included sample files or any other media file. Also if I try to launch Media Center after this it will start but it just sits at a blank screen (ie. the Media Center wall paper/interface never shows up).

I have run the Window memory diagnostic. No problems found with memory.

Are there any other diagnostic tools that any one recommends for checking HDD, motherboards, and other system critical components. I have done a repair install and run sfc. Nothing has been found. Still hanging.

Also last night I got a 'IE8 stopped working' popup.

I am no system build expert so I am trying to figure out if I have a HW issue, OS issue or a combination of problems. This system is a pretty basic build and I have not installed many third party programs so I am getting frustrated especially if these are OS problems.

Did you install latest video driver for the onboard HD?

Intel® Driver Update Utility

Updated video drivers and network drivers. Still hanging....

I definitely have a DVD RW hardware issue, but the files I have been playing are on the LAN or local to the HDD.

CraigW said:

Updated video drivers and network drivers. Still hanging....

I definitely have a DVD RW hardware issue, but the files I have been playing are on the LAN or local to the HDD.

If you go through this procedure to collect more info it may be possible to gain insight into why the process is periodically unresponsive:

https://www.sevenforums.com/crash-loc...tml#post351755

For some reason something I did seemed to fix it for the time being.

Things I did recently:

1 - Installed the shark codec pack and the x64 components
2 - Updated the video driver (thought I had done this before, but it was definately an older version being displayed in the device manager).
3 - Disabled IDT audio driver, heard current version may have an issue
4 - Turned the Media Features off and on in 'Turn features On and Off' start menu command
5 - when I first powered the system on last night, it popped up a message about finishing an install. So I don't know if some driver install was hung. I know I restarted several times after the last driver update was applied. It could have been related to the turning the media features off and back on.
6 - I reran the Windows system performance which did popup a message about tuning my media player settings. Also my system benchmark went from 3.6 to 4.9.
7 - Reenabled IDT audio since I don't have it hooked up to an HDMI display with audio. Did some audio configuration settings.

So I don't have an exact answer but the player and media center were performing flawlessly with the HD sample clips and streaming some AVI home movies over the network.