Media Centre redux

So after the weekend's problems with MediaCentre on Windows7, I spent some more time to straighten things out. So far, I've done the following:

• Uninstalled MediaCentre in an effort to get MediaPortal recognising all the remote control's buttons. I thought maybe MediaCentre had some form of resident program such that whenever you pressed the Home/Start key on the remote, it would intercept the call and fire up MCE. After MCE was uninstalled though, the remote still wouldnt' function properly in Media Portal. I reset the configuration, and did everything short of rebuilding the machine. From what I can tell, Windows itself is intercepting the calls, and not passing them through to Media Portal. Which sucks, as currently it renders Media Portal on Windows 7 useless.
• Uninstalled Media Portal, and re-installed MediaCentre.
• Experienced the same problems as before.
• Fired up Windows Media Player. Found that it needs to be run once to do all it's configuration. Is it possible that MCE is mucking about because WMP hasn't been configured? Ran through the WMP configuraiton, including adding in the libraries for the network shares.
• WMP took a long time to rebuild the music library from the PC over the network, but it did get there. It ran all night an most of the day, but slow and steady won that race. It picked up all the ID3 tags (which are now correct, thanks Tag&Rename and AudioShell!!!), and sorted everything correctly into their right albums and artists.
• However, as soon as WMP finished inxeding the library, it started again. And again. And again. All the time, eating up 100% CPU to do so.

So - it's NOT a MediaCentre issue after all - it's a WMP issue (which MCE heavily uses and relies upon). Some googling found this thread about people experiencing the same problem (and only that thread at this time. Strange...). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a resolution at the moment, other than "don't use WMP". I really hope Microsoft fix this, as it's rendered MediaCentre useless for me. I can't browse the music library, becasue the machine is too busy "Updating My Library" for me. I can't play a song, because all the CPU is going to updating the library. I click on Play, and nothing happens for 5 mins. Then, when I'm in brushing my teeth, the music starts. It plays for a second or two, then stops. 3 minutes pass. then another 3 seconds of music. Then golden silence. And so on. I've not even *tried* playing a DVD yet! Frustrating!

All that said, I've become quite attached to MediaCentre. It's interface is a lot cleaner than Media Portal's, which can be a bit fussy in areas. And it's installation and setup is much more straightforward and easy. When you can stop WMP from eating all the CPU, MCE is really quite snappy, even on this old hardware. I'm just intrigued as to what's causing this WMP behaviour - apparently it wasn't behaving this way in the Beta build. I really hope that someone in MS is alerted to the fact it's doing this, and is able to fix it up before it goes RTM. Personally, I hope they fix it before then, actually, since this is currently the only major roadblock for me to actually pay for the new OS when it's released. I'd like that re-assurance that it's working properly before needing to part with my hard-earned.

((hmm - really should get some photos up on this blog - it's looking very bare and sterile so far!))