Media Center 2005 and XBox 360 Woes

I've got a 100Mbps wired home and the Media Extender of the 360 continually tells me:

Session Terminated.  Another user or application on the windows media center-based PC has disconnected this device.

It makes me reconnect and everything is really slow.  Very frustrating, especially since I just spent a lot of time and effort wiring the house to eliminate wireless slugishness.

I stumbled on this knowledge base article from Microsoft:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911123.

Everything on my end was go, except I did have an error in the Application event viewer using Method 4.  The application listed was not very helpful.  It pointed to the Visual Studio Just-in-time debugger which was trying to catch the problem in a different application.  The error in the event viewer said:

Unauthorized window was detect while running the Media Center Experience, 'Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger', with file name '.

I removed Visual Studio 2005 hoping it would directly name the problematic application or driver, but apparently removing VS2005 doesn't remove the JIT debugger.  I also saw an article describing a DirectX filter that could cause problems and crash the Media Remote Manager throwing up Dr. Watson which has the same result as what I was seeing for those that don't have Visual Studio installed.

A few weeks ago, there was recorded TV show that I couldn't delete.  After deleting it finally, the extender from the 360 worked fine.  In a couple of days, the problem came back.  This time I moved all the recorded shows away and it didn't help.

A bunch of speculation is floating online as to what the problem could be: drivers, firewalls, virus protection, directx filters, FAT32, switches, routers, driver settings, etc.  I tried a lot of stuff and finally got it working let me tell you what did and didn't work:

Didn't work:

• Setting the network interface duplex mode to 100Mbps full, leave this on Auto.
• Wasn't the network cables or the switch.  Having an extra switch, cables and a laptop helped out here.  The network performance tuner showed terrible performance, but I think I had changed the duplex at this point.  Putting the desktop MCE and my laptop on a local switch bypasssing the house wiring helped figure out the house wiring was fine.
• Turning off the firewall didn't help.
• Turning off virus scanner didn't help.
• All the DirectX video decoders were fine.
• Removing MyTvToGo, Musicmatch MCE
• Removed Windows Media Player 11, went back to 10 with Windows Media Connect, lot of hassle but had no effect.
• Removing about 10 - 15 other applications

This is were it gets a little sketchy because I'm not sure extactly which of these solved the problem.

• Removing Quicktime/iTunes and it's update manager
• Removed Media Center Extender, searched in registry and hard drive for MCX which is the media center user.  At one point, I had 3 MCX profiles in Documents and Settings.  In this search, I found nothing.
• Reinstalled the latest Media Center Extender software from www.xbox.com/pcsetup.  I already had the latest and did this several times, hard to believe this could be the solution.
• A few other applications, not ZoneAlarm or any of the other biggies mentioned online.

Bottom line is that it's working fine now.  It had to be an application or an application's driver, but unfortunately I can't tell you exactly which one.  Hopefully this will be a good starting point for you.  Let me know what your experience was like.

UPDATE (4/24/07) - Fixed it.  See other blog entry: Vista and Xbox 360 Slow Wired Network Performance

UPDATE (11/15/07) - Just to be clear, remove all of these apps didn't help.  The network duplexing was the issue.  With Vista, the broadcom network drivers settings weren't being retained after reboot.  See other blog entry for details: Vista and Xbox 360 Slow Wired Network Performance