While trying to view one of the files on my website online, I discovered it wouldn't play. I thought it was my site, than found out it was all WMP encoded files anywhere, that I tried to play. They simply don't do anything. The mouse icon becomes an hourglass for a second, and then it goes back to the arrow, and nothing happens. I've already messed with the file associations, and they're still the way they're supposed to be. I redownloaded it and reinstalled as well, still no good.

Recently, I installed the 30 day trial version of McAfee's personal firewall, and I suppose it's possible the two may be related. I don't remember WMP files not playing before the installation. I told personal firewall to allow all access to WMP, however, so now I don't know what to do.

I like the WMP files for my site because you can get them pretty small and still get good quality, and most people seem to be able to view them, and they've been easier to upload, for some reason, than Quicktime encoded files.

the sea of bass works for me!

get rid of all mcafee products, your computer will thank you.

i use zonealarm and avg virus protection, they are both free... i believe that there is also something called tiny personal firewall(?) that has a good rep... spybot search and destroy for adware, you should be good to go.

if you are unable to play wmp files on other websites, it could be a virus... i have had that happen to me before... it kept re-loading on startup of the computer, despite clearing it out with spybot... i finally had to edit the registry to get rid of it!

So McAfee bad? Any other tips on getting WMP to work properly?

Just go to www.microsoft.com/mediaplayer, download
the latest player and install it. That should hopefully get things
working again.

I doubt the virus program is responsible for it. But it could be...
Those programs do have a tendency to get their fingers into a
lot of pies.

I'll try all the suggestions. Thanks.

windows media player has become the next frontier for virus writers, because it needs scripting to operate a lot of the internet stuff... you can turn off scripting in outlook and internet explorer, but the last i heard, you don't have that choice with wmp.

at one point viruses were getting spread via wmp simply by changing the player skin, or by requesting bogus media license files... most recently, there are these:
http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-5211168.html?tag=nl
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/w32agobotbm.html

the specific problem that i was having was that the .wmp video file would completely download off of the internet into the wmp cache, but only play partway thru, before the picture froze... if you saved the same video file locally instead, it would play back fine in wmp... bizzare!