Windows Media Player Network Sharing eating lots of CPU

Question

There is a process, wmpnetwk.exe, which sometimes goes crazy and starts eating like 60-70% CPU. If I kill the process it just comes back again, so the only solution I've found is to stop the WMPNetworkSvc service, which makes the whole thing stop. I think the service comes back again too after while, but I think that's because I turned off the computer.

Anyway, I don't use WMP, so I don't care if this is disabled, but I'd like to know what's causing it (Google has revealed that it also happened to other people), and if there's a more permanent way of fixing the problem.

Answer 1

Try disabling the option in WMP to lookup information on the internet. I had this issue occasionally and haven't noticed the problem since I changed this setting, however it is a little early to be sure.

Answer 2

Enter this in a command prompt window to turn it off permanently:

sc config WMPNetworkSvc start= demand

or if you're really serious:

sc config WMPNetworkSvc start= disabled

though the first is really good enough. If you're using Windows 7/Vista you'll need to make sure this is an elevated command prompt.