Annoying Behaviour of Windows Media Player in Windows 7

[Rob]

Recently I noticed that my hard drive had inexplicably gone into the 'red' although I could not understand why as I should have had at least 100 Mbytes free space. On investigating, mainly by trial and error, I found that Windows Media Player was making thumbnails of all my JPGs, a lot of which were album covers associated with iTunes music. I don't have Media Player as my preferred media device but it seems that even so the damn thing ignores your request and makes thumbnails regardless (thanks Microsoft, NOT). Not only that, it not only does it once but appears to repeat the process again and again. The upshot of this is that I had something approaching a million small JPG files stored, which were not only eating up memory but also slowing down the computer's speed.

To compound matters, Media Player stores these files as 'Read Only' and 'System' so you can't see them or delete them. The only solution I found was to call up a DOS Command Prompt and reset the file attributes which then allowed me to see and delete the files, a process that took more than a day to complete.

I'm not sure if this only applies to Windows 7 but if anyone else has this problem, here is a temporary fix ...

First start the command prompt and enter the line ... cd \Windows\serviceprofiles\networkservice\appdata\local\microsoft\media player\art cache\localmls

LocalMLS is the directory in which the files are stored.

Next enter the command ... attrib *.jpg -s -h -r which will reset the file attributes

Exit the command prompt and then you should be able to go to that directory and delete the files.

NOTE: This is not a permanent fix as Media Player will recreate the directory and start the process again. I've yet to find a way of switching this behaviour off.

PS. Make sure you disable the Recycle Bin before deleting otherwise you'll just move the problem somewhere else.

PPS. It's worthwhile doing a 'defrag' after deleting the files, if you had a lot of them.

 

[Mike]

That really is weird Rob,

If you don't use WMP as your main player, why not remove it
and find another that won't screw things up.

Mike.

 

[Rob]

Hi Mike, I had thought of that. I use iTunes for music but Media player seems embedded in so much of Windows that I'm loath to remove it in case something else screws up. I've written a little 'macro' script that runs at start up and and deletes the files before they build up too much so it's no longer a problem. It just annoys me that Microsoft haven't fixed this long ago as there are plenty of articles on the net about this ridiculous state of affairs.

 

[Mike]

Hi Mike, I had thought of that. I use iTunes for music but Media player seems embedded in so much of Windows that I'm loath to remove it in case something else screws up. I've written a little 'macro' script that runs at start up and and deletes the files before they build up too much so it's no longer a problem. It just annoys me that Microsoft haven't fixed this long ago as there are plenty of articles on the net about this ridiculous state of affairs.

You are more technical computerwise than I am, I wouldn't know
how to start writing a "Macro".

As for a Microsoft fix, maybe they don't know about it, have a
chat with them.

I use WMP, but I am not aware of it copying lots of images, but
I am still using XP Pro, so that might be stopping it from happening.

I will have to have a nose around my PC.

Mike.