Advice, Please?

This is not the end of the world but Widows Media Player suddenly cannot be found on my PC. I recently had to reload all my software due to a hard drive failure and I know it was there. In fact I used it to play some music files I downloaded from Rock.com. Suddenly I tried to play the same files I had just played an hour ago and I get the message that WMV.exe cannot be found. Anyone have an idea how this might happen? I have MusicMatch Jukebox to play music and something called BSPlayer to watch videos but neither are entirely satisfactory. Any suggestions? Is there one program that does it all and does it well?

There's a couple of options. One would be to reinstall Windows Media player... that would be a global solution but if you have certain types of media that are generically played by WMP but you prefer to use with other players then you'll have to reset the file associations individually for those, not a big deal, just takes a little time and manipulation(right click the file, choose "open with" from the list)

The second way is to assume WMP is still there, and it may well be, and jump to the second step above.... right click the file you want it to play, choose "open with" and select windows media player from the window that opens and check "always etc...."



EDIT- one other simple thing you could try is to reboot the computer. That might fix it too.

Well, what I definitely don't want to do is upgrade to Version 9 which it appears it is trying to get me to do. I found WMPlayer in the C:\Windows\Prefetch file but whenever I try to open one of these music files, it gives me the same runaround and asks if I want to upgrade. I made this mistake before and I thought it caused me a lot of problems.

Here's some info on reinstalling/repairing WMP8 which I assume you're using..

http://www.nwlink.com/~zachd/pss/pss.html#wmp8reinstall

Did you do this last time?