Paging Charlie Owen… Charlie Owen, to the operating room…

Hi, my name is Ken and I’ve been having some trouble with windows media center on my HP media center computer. Whenever I open windows media center it comes up with an error message that says messenger failure. I know messenger is installed but it comes up anyway. I then tried to uninstall and reinstall rollup 2 because that’s what some help forum said to do but it won’t reinstall. I just hooked up the cable to my computer so I could watch TV with media center, my PC has a built-in tuner, and now is says tuner not available: the tuner is currently in use by another application or is not working.

On the Messenger front, I don’t know if it’s the Windows Messenger, the Messenger service, or MSN Messenger. Are you logging into your Passport account, Ken? Is the Internet connected to the machine when you get the error? On the tuner front, I wonder if there’s another video app that’s open in the background (for whatever reason)? I realize it’s a bit extreme, but consider clearing out many – if not all – of your Startup items via MSCONFIG.EXE.

And then, there’s a Windows Movie Maker Problem…

When I open movie maker an error message pops up saying “The collections file is not valid or is corrupt. A new empty collections file has been created.” When I try to open a movie maker file it says “class not registered”. When I try to capture video it doesn’t work. I tried to uninstall it from add/remove programs and it isn’t in the list. So as you can see I’m in a bit of a mess, which brings me to my solution if I can’t find any other way to fix these problems.

Hrm. Sounds like you may need to register a few files (to the operating system). Try entering: regsvr32 quartz.dll (from the Run command field in your Start Menu). If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to kick ‘er up a notch.

My Solution, unless you have a better idea…

At first I was going to restore my computer to an earlier restore point, sometime in May, but I tried that but it didn’t work twice. So I’m going to try to use the system restore discs, but once again I have a problem, I am missing CD 1, is there a way to restore your computer to factory order by some other mean other than the CDs the computer came with, if not I’ll have to see if I can order CD 1 from HP or something.

P.S. To top it all off I can’t double click on most icons, it just won’t open, I have to right click and open that way. Not sure if you know how I could fix that. I’ll probably end up buying a Mac in the future.

So, Ken lost one of his system restore CDs (why wasn’t MCE put on a DVD?) and he’s having issues with the Explorer shell. It’s a sad state of affairs when he’s ready to trade it all in for a completely separate set of frustrations: OS X. It’s not that Windows is bad, but… people are just sick of putting up with half of these problems. Can’t say I blame ‘em, either.

Users are impatient – and rightfully so.

• Do You Hulu?
• How Do You Remote Control Your Media Center?
• What Free Media Center Software Do You Use?
• Media Center TV Tuner