Media Player - Options Menu Not Responding

kx707 · 27 Nov 2023

I've had a very interesting problem with the Windows Media Player that appears to have been caused by the antivirus program Avast One Essential.

Could there be any other factors involved?

The problem occurred on my second Windows 10 Home desktop computer which uses WiFi for the Internet connection. The problem was seen after opening the Media player and clicking on Organize, Options, and then Rip Music. If I changed the Audio Quality setting using the Slider and then clicked OK, the Window would not close. A second click on OK would result in a Not Responding message and the Window would eventually time out and close.

A number of tests were run on the computer and Windows was reinstalled from an ISO file. A second reinstall from the same ISO file did fix the problem if all apps and settings were deleted. The disk was then restored from a backup.

I then ran MSCONFIG specifying Diagnostic Startup. The problem was not seen after reboot. Diagnostic Startup had disabled many of the services.

A little later I found a solution totally by accident. The Windows Network settings let you specify Public or Private Network. The problem with the Media Player was only seen when specifying Public Network. The Media Player worked correctly when specifying Private Network.

My next step was to remove the Avast antivirus program. This fixed the problem. It's hard to understand why removing an antivirus program would affect the Media Player Options Menu. My only thought was that Avast includes a Network Inspector.

Thanks for any thoughts or information.

Windows 10 Version 22H2 (OS Build 19045.3693)

fishingfool · 02 Dec 2023

Hi kx707
I haven't used avast in years but I would suspect that the options menu problem was just a side effect of a shield setting.
I know it's to late now that you've removed it but did you try disabling avast's 4 core shields then re-enabling them one at a time as described below. Each shield has multiple setting options as well. It may have been a matter of tweaking a few settings. Just my 2 cents worth. Again, I speak not from current experience with avast

How to adjust settings for Core Shields in Avast Antivirus | Avast

dalchina · 02 Dec 2023

Something of a related experience, perhaps: I found casting audio files to my TV had stopped working on 1 of 2 laptops.

Eventually I found it was because of a blocked port - going through the removal procedure for Hypervisor happened to unblock at (that after some research) - so not a firewall issue in my case.

Casting uses WMP.

kx707 · 02 Dec 2023

Thanks fishingfool and dalchina for your comments.

I'm using Avast One Essential which does not provide the same settings options as shown in the referenced link. The program does provide an option to temporarily turn off the Web Shield and File Shield which I did try earlier. Neither of those changes helped with the problem. There are also some settings for the Email Guardian and Ransomware Protection. I did not make any changes to those settings.

I am now using Bitdefender and the Media Player is working fine. It also worked correctly when only using Microsoft Defender.

I didn't mention it earlier but my other Windows 10 computer has Avast One Essential and a wired Ethernet connection rather than Wi-Fi and the problem with the Media Player is not seen. There are other differences in the systems including Motherboard and Processor. System One has a GPT disk (UEFI) while System Two has an MBR disk (Legacy mode).

dalchina · 02 Dec 2023

Sometimes some aspect - or even update of- security software can have adverse consequences. I had to exclude something specifically from Avast (not on the basis of detection) - and in a recent thread, System Restore was reported as failing to complete because of Avira.