Major Recording Problems in my Media Center

My Vista Media Center has gone mad! I got home from work last night and Media Center had tried to record the same program 6 times, and reported a conflict in the event log that the TV program was causing a conflict with it's self, and the program had been split in to 5 small chunks.

When I checked the Event viewer it was complaining that the Belgium Grand Prix could not be recorded due:

F1: Belgian Grand Prix Qualifying Highlights was not recorded because the program was pre-empted by the broadcaster. According to the Program Guide F1: Belgian Grand Prix Qualifying aired instead at 09/15/2007 12:30:00 on channel 28

Now the Belgian GP is on next week and this error is in the EPG every minute since yesterday and now all recording fail and in Media Center it reports a Critical Error.

So I headed over to TheGreenButton and found I was not alone with this problem and it looks like it has been happening for a couple of weeks to various people. The best way to fix it seemed to be:

posed by HT Slider

1.  Right click on "Computer" and select "Manage".

2.  Open up the services and get ready to temporarily shut down the "Windows Media Center Scheduler Service" and "Windows Media Center Receiver Service".

3.  Open up the following directory "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording".

4.  Shut down both of the Media Center services in #2 above and quickly rename (or delete) the "Recording.xml" and "Recording.xml.bak" (the Media Center Services restart for some reason and you can't properly delete the recording schedule data without having them shut down).

5.  Start the service "Windows Media Center Service Launcher" (this will start both of the other services correctly).

This seems to have worked for me but of it has wiped all my scheduled recordings, so I am going to try using my backup copy, thanks to mceBackup 2.0 and I will report back later

Update: I have decided to re-schedule my recording as I have never really cleaned it up

Read the complete post at http://iandixon.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!36983156CAA83EA9!2271.entry