Spenser

Between periods of work I'll play some music. It's easier to just have my media player open throughout my entire session rather than opening it every time I want to listen to 5 minutes of music. System refresh ? - do you mean a System Restore or a Restore back to Factory Settings ? I mean Windows 8's new "Refresh Your PC without Affecting Your Files" feature.

A few weeks ago I did a system refresh on my Windows 8 (64bit) laptop and ever since Windows Media Player 12 has become a resource hogging nightmare. Just having WMP12 open (without even playing anything) causes my entire system to slowdown. This is especially noticable when web browsing (with any browser). Loading pages takes forever, and when I type in any text fields, on a message board for example, my cursor cannot keep up with what I am typing. Even without playing any music WMP12 memory consumption is around 800MB, with CPU usage sometimes hovering around 30%. I cannot for the life of me figure out what is going on, and as it is now my system is unusable when WMP12 is open. I tired disabling the WMP network sharing service that is often noted as a resource hog but that didn't solve anything. I tried uninstalling/disabling WMP and re-enabling it to no avail. Before my system refresh WMP12 was relatively fine. Doing another refresh is not really an option right now. Any ideas?