Windows 7: Videos will not play after watching tv

When i start media center it will play videos of all sorts just fine from a mapped network drive i have added to the media library. However after i turn on the tv option and watch tv or record tv and i select a video file it will do nothing, even after i stop tv playback/record.
Sometimes it will start the video a random amount of time later, say like 30minutes when ive continued to watch something else; live tv or a recording.
When i exit mediacenter and select a file to open with media center it will play just fine, and if i subsequently open another video file it opens instantly untill i watch some more tv, at which point i have to restart the media center app again or wait a random amount of time (15+min) for it to spontaniously open.

I have tried using diffrent codecs (ffdshow, dscaler) and installed windvd but to no avail. Does anyone know what may be causing this problem?

i have a shuttle xpc 1Gb ram, P4 3ghz 250GB WD HD, an nvidia gforce 6600 and a hauppage wintv pvr 150MCE.

Right click on the taskar>Start Task Manager>Click the Networking tab and review the level of data being sent while playing the streaming videos, then stop WMC and see if the streaming stops (the level should drop way down). I suggest it is not stopping. Once the stream does stop the next video starts. Am I correct?

As many of the Shuttle products are customized, check with Shuttle.

Is the WinTV PVR 150 MCE compatible with Windows 7 Media Center?

I suggest at least 2GB of RAM for WMC and a dual core CPU, a larger SATA HD and one of these tuners.

When streaming a typical xvid over the network my network usage moves around abit between 0.10% and 0.40%(gigabit network), which is the same as when i open similar videos using videolan for example. When the playback pauses or stops the network usage drops to 0% as expected.

Though i know i do not have the most muscular system for windows 7 all components work just fine. Watching TV has not given me any problems yet (and it used to be awful in winXP mce) and when i freshly start MCE or use 'open with' > media center it will play all videos on network drives just fine. Also when i have watched a video from file it switches back to TV without any problems.

The problem im having is that once ive started tv playback in a media center session i can not get videos to open instantly anymore. As i mentioned the videos i try to open will open after about 15-20minutes, so when i give up on opening a video and start watching a recorded tv program 20minutes in the earlier selected video will open seemingly from out of nowhere.

Ps. the 250GB is serving me just fine, it will keep about 80 recorded programs on disk including 5 feature length movies at the moment, more than enough for me since all my downloaded videos are on a networked disk. I suppose when you record HDTV it will eat up more diskspace, fortunately for me i do not have digital TV and not planning on it since the cable provider only supplies some key channels on analogue cable and not on digital (notably the BBC channels)

pluxux,

How full is your hardrive when this issue occurs? Does it happen when your hardrive is not very full and has been defragged?