Windows XP MCE 2005 Upgrade Problems (and Solutions)

Like every other developer out there that has taken the plunge into Windows XP Media Center Edition, I downloaded the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 a couple of days ago and applied the 2004 version as an upgrade. At first, everything looked like it was working. I upgraded and launched MCE 2005. The TV was working so I was happy. The next day, I needed to help someone with some ASP.NET development. Wouldn’t you know that for whatever reason, Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 decided that it couldn’t find any of the project templates (.vbproj, .csproj, etc.) and even the macros; although were showing in the list and physically on the drive was giving me a similar error.

I remembered Duncan saying something similar to this several months ago and he provided a link to a solution he found that worked for him. It’s pretty long and drawn out, but let me tell you first hand… go ahead and follow all of the instructions. However, some notes:

1. For whatever reason, running in Diagnostic Boot mode wasn’t allowing me to install the .NET Framework. I reverted back to a regular boot and things started working smoothly.
2. This outline was written pre-.NET 1.1 SP1; so when I would try to reinstall the framework it would appear to work with no problems. Looking at the debug log, I noticed that it pointed out the mscoree.dll was a newer version. It got me to thinking; maybe I should reapply the service pack for .NET 1.1. Did so and everything started to fall into place.

One interesting note is that the shortcut to your temp folder is %temp%… I’ve got to remember that. Also, why is it that so much software seems to be so dirty in concern to the temp folder. I must of had 2gig of crap in there…

On to another problem… a friend of mine called saying he was having problems with his not working. He just recently got the MCE bug so he was building a new machine. He couldn’t get MCE to show TV… and trying to use WinTV (he and I are both using Hauppauge cards), it wasn’t working with it either. I tried to open my copy of WinTV and sure enough, it wasn’t working… returning an hTV=0 error (if memory serves me). Did some searching and followed the instructions to re-install all the drivers (according to Hauppauge, that was the proper thing to do). Still didn’t work. After playing around for a bit more, I decided that it’s got to be the way MCE is launching and is somehow attaching to the card. Started digging around in the running process and found several eh*.exe’s running. One of them was ehRecvr.exe… hmmm… that sounds like something that may be attached to the encoder. I killed it. Started WinTV and it was happy. To take this a step further, I closed WinTV and launched MCE. MCE will apparently automatically launch ehRecvr.exe if needed.

As for MCE not working, I found out he had an older VGA card. Told him to go out and get a ~$99 NVidia and that would probably solve that problem. He did so and everything fell into place ;-)

Hopefully, there’s not any more gotchas caused by this upgrade ;-) keeping fingers crossed