High cpu usage by wmpnetwk.exe

I want to use Xbox 360 as Media Center Extender. But whenever I turn on Media Sharing on Windows Media Player 11 running on Windows Vista, I notice in task Manager that wmpnetwk.exe is eating up complete 100% cpu resources. And it keeps it the same until I shutdown media sharing.

Changing wmpnetwk.exe priority from task manager wont helps. It still usage the same 100% resources. So far have tried almost every settings but none of them worked and hence am not able to make Xbox a s Media Center Extender. Do you guys have any working solution to prevent wmpnetwk using up so much of resource?

Please help.

Have you installed any third party firewall on your system like Norton or any other? If not, is wmpnetwk.exe process allowed in your default windows firewall? I need to know this because it is the firewall itself that could be interacting badly with the service. Just the firewall and settings and reply back.

Yes, there is McAfee firewall installed on my computer. I’m using the same default windows firewall and I noticed that whenever I enabled Media Sharing on WMP it dynamically makes changes to the firewall on my computer. And as my Xbox console is on the same LAN segment I don’t think there is any need to open anything on my external firewall. Any other help please?

As the problem mentioned is with wmpnetwk.exe, so obviously it is related to the network only and most probably the firewalls. There are some certain settings made for WMP to be placed in Firewalls. I think you are missing the same hence the process is using the entire CPU to get to those settings. Anyways, just check out this Microsoft KB and place all the settings provided here for WMP under Firewall: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...ing.mspx#q20_7

Thank you very much for your reply Boo Bear. As you suggested I did the same. Added all required ports as suggested in the article but that dint worked at all. Even, later I disabled all my firewalls completely but surprisingly still wmpnetwk need the 100% CPU resource to run. If I turn off media sharing the spu usage comes back to 1 to 2%.

Somebody please help.

This JUST helped me:
Apparently WMP sharing service has problems with corrupt or incomplete .avi's. So if you are in the process of downloading something or something is corrupted. I canceled extracting a movie. I had to kill the wmpnetwk process, and delete the folder and I was good to go. Then either delete it or move it out of the sharing folder