Media Player 12 / ntdll.dll problem

Jeffopolis · 22 Jan 2010

Hello, Ive been having an issue with windows 7 ever since i got it. I was originally running x64 and all was well until the explorer.exe started using 100% of my cpu randomly. Using process explorer i found it to be ntdll.dll that was the culprit, and killing the threads would only temporarily fix the issue.

Another big issue was that windows media player 12 would free often and i would have to restart it several times in order for it to work properly, which is a major annoyance to me since the main function of my laptop is for music.

Anyway, i decided to reformat yesterday to 32 bit windows 7 in hopes that it would fix the issue. The same day of reformatting i ended up having the same issue after transferring all my music, videos, pictures, etc back onto my laptop. This time, however it seems to be worse.

Whenever I select a folder with music to play, the player begins to play the music, and then freezes after 6 seconds. The music continues to play, however, the media player is no longer functioning. i can not skip, forward, stop, pause, etc at all and clicking the player brings up the "close the program, wait for program to start working" screen, every time. Using process explorer, it says that either wmpnetwrk.exe and/or wmplayer.exe is using 40% + of my cpu, often, one or both combined results in 100% usage of my cpu. Clicking either of the two brings up the ntdll.dll file as the culprit, once again.

I can not play any music without the media player freezing, and am not sure what to do. I have tried removing and re-adding wmp through the "remove windows features" thing, and that did not work.

I'm not sure what to do.

seekermeister · 22 Jan 2010

Have you considered trying a different audio player? Since you haven't filled out your specs, I don't know what soundcard that you have, but I really like Creative's MediaSource. There are others that many people like, but none come to mind at the moment.

Jeffopolis · 22 Jan 2010

i honestly would rather not use a different media player, i love wmp, except it refuses to work now...

i guess i could use zune player since i have a zune anyway...

edit: well i just downloaded zune player, and the music works fine now but im still having an issue with the cpu running at 100%

it switches between explorer.exe and wmpnetwrk.exe now... checking the source its still ntdll.dll which is using a lot of cpu.

updating my computer specs but the specs are not an issue.

Dom · 23 Jan 2010

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-con.../download1.gif
Try that program for fixing WMP.
This is a long shot, but in the start menu search type in

cmd

and press 'Shift' + 'Enter'.
In that command prompt, type in

sfc /scannow

and press enter.
As I said, this is a long shot but could do something to fix the ntdll.dll file.

Jeffopolis · 07 Feb 2010

ughh its only gettin worse, explorer seems to eat up my cpu anytime i do anything with music, regardless what music player im using. and no its not a virus, worm, etc i just reinstalled everything. i think im gonna downgrade back to windows vista, that shit was flawless

Dom · 08 Feb 2010

Don't step away from 7, it just seems that you may have had a dodgy installation disk, with corrupt/missing files.
Can you ask the person you got the disc from for a new one?

baarod · 08 Feb 2010

Jeffopolis said:

ughh its only gettin worse, explorer seems to eat up my cpu anytime i do anything with music, regardless what music player im using. and no its not a virus, worm, etc i just reinstalled everything. i think im gonna downgrade back to windows vista, that shit was flawless

I suspect metadata issues with your music files. Have you used a mp3tag editor on them? Stored album art in the files? Try using mp3tag Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...) to rewrite those tags on a sampling of your music. To do this, copy some of the problem files to a temporary folder and use mp3tag to remove all the tags. Then use the mp3tag undo feature.