Re-installing Windows Media Player?

[Matthew Gordon]

Well, ever since a virus has cause havok, my WiMP has refused to start at all. I even went a downloaded WiMP9 and tried to see if installing it would work, but it still doesn't want to start. It screams about an internal application error and dies before I can get it loaded up. Is there any way to completely remove the damned thing and re-install it, or am I stuck with a broken WiMP until I format and re-install Windows?

[Shining Arcanine]

Have you tried System Restore (be sure to make sure it doesn't restore the virus)?

If you haven't, I recall reading a way to uninstall Windows Media Player. I did it to Windows Messenger and it killed MSN Messenger on me even after I reinstalled the stuff it took out so I don't recommend using it to do a reinstall. System Restore saved me a reformat.

[Matthew Gordon]

System Restore is pretty much worthless - the virus existed on my system the second I installed XP - it was already on my system to begin with (in fact, it killed XP entirely). I installed 98SE and tried running an anti-virus and it obivously didn't notice a damned thing wrong, so I re-installed XP and ran it for a few days until I noticed the virus had returned. So system restoring is useless (not to mention that it's off...).

If there is no easy way to pull it off, then oh well, but I want WiMP to play my videos... I guess I'll wait for my shiny new harddrive...

[Shining Arcanine]

This sounds bad, are you sure you tried everything? AntiVirus disks, online scans, etc? If you are sure you have tried everything, have you reformated? Unless the virus manages to get into the BIOS (very few do that), a reformat will kill it.

[Matthew Gordon]

Actually, I managed to kill it off a while ago. I had only reformated my XP partition, yet it was in my FAT32 data partition - I just wasn't able to knock it out with the antivirus I had on 98SE - although I managed to get NAV 2003 installed on XP and I was able to kill it (heh, I tired killing it with NAV in safe mode once before and my computer went *poof* and rebooted - Windows XP wouldn't boot though). The damage that it caused, however, with WiMP (and I believe it also got to my sister's IE on her computer via the network as well) remained, though.

[Shining Arcanine]

How did it execute if you did a reformat? Either you executed it or there is something wrong with your computer and it isn't a virus.

[nemesis01]

Start>>Run

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection C:\WINDOWS\INF\wmp.inf,Uninstall

Use that with caution though, when I used that a while ago it worked, but when I went to download it again I couldn't for some reason, so download the WMP9 package before running that command.

[Shining Arcanine]

Microsoft doesn't allow you to uninstall Windows Media Player for a reason, most likely because it can't be reinstalled as I found with MSN Messenger when I tried to kill Windows Messenger.

[nemesis01]

I have uninstalled Windows Messenger using a similar command to the one I posted above, never had any problems using MSN Messenger instead of the Windows version.

[Shining Arcanine]

Hmm... I did it by unhiding something that Microsoft hid from view in Add/Remove Windows Components, then uninstalled it via Add/Remove Windows Components, that might have made the difference. ^_^;;

[Matthew Gordon]

Heh, uninstalled and re-installed, but now it complains that it wasn't installed properly... oh well, I'll live without it for a few more days.

[Joe Gronlund]

Heh, uninstalled and re-installed, but now it complains that it wasn't installed properly... oh well, I'll live without it for a few more days.

what you needed to do, was remove the registry entry for it before the reinstall..

[Matthew Gordon]

Uninstall, remove from registry, re-install, internal application error.

[Joe Gronlund]

what registry entry did you remove?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\8.0

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\9.0

right?