Windows 7 - Media player opens but audio or video file won’t play

For the past several months, I've been having problems getting audio and video files to start playing, i.e. WMV, MP3, FLAC, MPEG, WAV, AVI, etc. The issue isn't isolated to Windows Media Player, although that is the player I use most often.

Here's what happens:
1) I Navigate to my media files via Windows Explorer.
2) Double click the file or select multiple files and right click "Play in Windows Media Player".
3) WMP will open but that is it. The blue circle will spin forever and the audio or video will never play.

My temporary solution:
1) Reboot the computer
OR
1) Force close WMP by clicking the "X" to close the program.
2) Go into Task Manager and kill the app even though I just closed it via clicking "X".
3) Re-open WMP by clicking the WMP launch icon, go into Tools / Options / Privacy / and click 'Clear History' and 'Clear Caches'.
4) Close WMP and then go back to Windows explorer and re-click on the desired file I want to play.

WMP will work fine until I either press stop and then play again on the same file or if I click on a different file in Windows Explorer.

I've tried other media players and I get the same result. The media program will open but the file never plays. The problem occurs regardless if I select the file to be played from Windows Explorer or from the media player’s file / open command or if I try to stream a video or audio file from a website.

In late December 2011, I went back to an earlier image of my system from July 2011. Everything seemed to work fine even after installing all of the patches since July. Then after about a week, the problem started occurring again. I have not installed any Windows updates since 12/31/11.

Hey snapfire

I would check default program settings and file associations.
Make sure that the programs you are using to open these file types aren't butting heads so to speak
(ie: set WMP to open all file types it can and take away permissions for your "other" program.

Go here for information on setting default programs:
Change which programs Windows uses by default

You can also try this: Windows Media Player Troubleshooting Guide

Thanks, AllOnTheBus.

That worked!

I should have posted back here sooner. It STILL doesn't work. I even uninstalled Media Monkey which I thought might be causing a file type conflict where two applications were both set as the default player for a particular file type--in this case mpg, mp3, wma, wmv, etc.

I also tried the Windows Media Player troubleshooting tool to no avail.

Any other suggestions?

Thank you.

did you look at the tutorial anak posted for you, try from step 6 in captain jacks tut and see if that does it for you.
also have you any third party codec packs installed?

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Thanks, Captain. I did and unfortunately, that didn't work either.

It is really strange because let's say I'm viewing a few family videos I've captured with my phone that I've imported to my computer. If after viewing a few of them in succession, I press stop on WMP to direct my attention elseware for a few minutes. When I come back and press play, WMP will just sit there. I then have to go through all that clearing of the cache and force closing the app in Task Manager to get it to work again. This is really frustrating.