Windows Media Player crashes when closed

I have absolutely the same issue, as described. I have spent 3 days trying to solve this issue w/o success. I have started searching on several forums and found out others people with the same issue. From my side, the issue started not closing the WMP, the cursor stays running and the only way to close was forcing the end at task manager. Now after applying several tips on those forums, the failure mode improved for taking 6 seconds to close. It is still to much time when compared with others players.
My question is: did you get the resolution for that? Any tip how to definitely solve it?

I just wanted to share my experiences with this bug... I am very sorry for bumping an old thread, but when I launch Windows Media Player in Windows 10 21h1, as an administrator, it doesn't crash upon close. Still I cannot do a lot in the program itself.

I have made a separate account as an administrator. My main account is a standard user account.

Edit: I withdraw my claim about Windows Media Player not crashing upon closing when run as an Administrator. It did crash just now when closing it...

Edit: I also thought it would be worth mentioning... on my laptop this does not occur at all. Only​ on my desktop.

Skull Kid said:

I just wanted to share my experiences with this bug... I am very sorry for bumping an old thread, but when I launch Windows Media Player in Windows 10 21h1, as an administrator, it doesn't crash upon close. Still I cannot do a lot in the program itself.

I have made a separate account as an administrator. My main account is a standard user account.

Edit: I withdraw my claim about Windows Media Player not crashing upon closing when run as an Administrator. It did crash just now when closing it...

Edit: I also thought it would be worth mentioning... on my laptop this does not occur at all. Only​ on my desktop.

Very peculiar your laptop doesn't have this issue. Could you please post your crash log here?

JohnnyGui said:

Very peculiar your laptop doesn't have this issue. Could you please post your crash log here?

Sure. Here it is.

Faulting application name: wmplayer.exe, version: 12.0.19041.1, time stamp: 0x27d3a83c

Faulting module name: combase.dll, version: 10.0.19041.1081, time stamp: 0xbc34a44f

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x00141e00

Faulting process ID: 0x244c

Faulting application start time: 0x01d78c20c4e48fc4

Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe

Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\combase.dll

Report ID: 206d5e97-e3ce-41cb-a593-ed07f8ec2792

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

Skull Kid said:

Sure. Here it is.

Faulting application name: wmplayer.exe, version: 12.0.19041.1, time stamp: 0x27d3a83c

Faulting module name: combase.dll, version: 10.0.19041.1081, time stamp: 0xbc34a44f

Exception code: 0xc0000005

Fault offset: 0x00141e00

Faulting process ID: 0x244c

Faulting application start time: 0x01d78c20c4e48fc4

Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe

Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\combase.dll

Report ID: 206d5e97-e3ce-41cb-a593-ed07f8ec2792

Faulting package full name:

Faulting package-relative application ID:

Thanks, your log seems a bit different than mine and another user (faulting process) Probably because of a different version.

Skull Kid said:

Actually, I might have solved the issue with Windows Media Player (32 & 64-bit versions, but particularly the 32-bit version) eating away at the memory. On my particular desktop, it was using as much as 1 GB of memory! I used the Command Prompt and a certain command, which I also modified a bit. The command to re-register the Windows Media Player dll's are the following:

For 32-bit: for %%a in (%systemroot%\sysWOW64\wm*.dll) do regsvr32 /s %%a

for 64-bit: for %%a in (%systemroot%\system32\wm*.dll) do regsvr32 /s %%a

Good Luck! I didn't get rid of the crashing issue, but it seems to work anyway, as long as I don't l don't close it...

You mean it solved the RAM eating issue right? I'm not sure I'm having this problem, really hope the crashing issue would be fixed.

Yes. It seems very random though... as of writing this, Windows Media Player my desktop isn't even using 100 MB of memory... from 1 GB to 50 MB... wow... But I won't celebrate anything, until the issue is solved for sure. That includes the crashing issue.

I have a similar issue. WMP works perfectly but every day when I close it and shut down my PC I get a critical error in my reliability history. I would not even know there is a problem if I didn't look in reliability history (problem=stopped working, event=appcrash). It has been doing this for a very long time. No harm done but I'd like to fix it if possible? I'll pay attention to the exact time when I shut down my PC today... to see if the error occurs when I close WMP or when I shut down my PC?