lilflip21:

I have Vista Ultimate X86 - SP1 RTM - 2 Xbox 360 extenders both still working perfectly

I've been pondering if Ultimate-users are having better luck because of the fact that Remote Desktop is included.. It's a long shot though and I'm not about to dish out that dough for extra few features that I have no use for just to try my theory. :)

AntonNilsson - As far as Extenders are concerned there is no difference between Ulitmate and Home versions of Vista. Do you see the certificate error every time you attempt to setup or connect the Extender to the Media Center PC?

rgreenpc - I would be very suspicious if backing off SP1 resolved your issue.

What type of router are you using on your home network?

Can you try forcing the link speed for the nic to 100 Mbps Full Duplex and see if that changes the symptoms?

seang - Are you seeing the same issue? Did you upgrade the driver and get the same 100% repro like rgreenpc?

I searched but did not find a previous version of the driver.

JenelleCoberlyatMSFT:

seang - Are you seeing the same issue? Did you upgrade the driver and get the same 100% repro like rgreenpc?

I searched but did not find a previous version of the driver.

 

No.  I did not upgrade to SP1 yet (I'll wait for the official release to be posted on WindowsUpdate).  I am having a different network  issue upon startup (which I'll post on a new message) but my Xbox is streaming fine with the V12.4 Intel NIC drivers.

JenelleCoberlyatMSFT:

AntonNilsson - As far as Extenders are concerned there is no difference between Ulitmate and Home versions of Vista. Do you see the certificate error every time you attempt to setup or connect the Extender to the Media Center PC?

The certificate error started out in late January. I haven't had that before.

Before late January I just got a error message about some timing (as quoted in one of my first posts here).

Problem is that I spent about an hour and a half looking through the event viewer and I simply cannot find anything consistent. There's always some kind of warning or error when trying to connect but it appears to differ which one it is. The symptoms are always the same though.

And as mentioned, uninstalling SP1 makes all these problems go away.

In case that it is of any importance here's my current driver setup:

nforce networking controller: 67.5.8.0
geforce 7400: 7.15.11.7412
realtek hda: 6.0.1.5559
atheros AR5006EG wireless: 7.4.2.40 (though I keep this disabled when at home)

I don't have much in the way of third party drivers installed on my computer in case that matters: I have ffdshow with only MPEG4/H.264 components activated as well as the hali media splitter and the problems were there before I installed that
I also have PowerDVD Ultra installed but MCE seems to use the standard vista codecs and not any third party ones when running a DVD for an example.

rgreenpc - what router are you using in your home network? Does the lag continue if the PC and Xbox are directly connected to eachother? When you say the newer drivers do you mean the 12.4 drivers?

After rolling back SP1 are you still seeing network congestion events in the event viewer?

JenelleCoberlyatMSFT:

rgreenpc - what router are you using in your home network? Does the lag continue if the PC and Xbox are directly connected to eachother? When you say the newer drivers do you mean the 12.4 drivers?

After rolling back SP1 are you still seeing network congestion events in the event viewer?

stephenv:

Hi Jenelle,
I am able to connect using a xbox 360 as a media center extender, but under SP1 RC the mcx1 ehshell.exe will hang. This is on vista ultimate x64. As the eshell.exe is hung there is no reporting to the event viewer that is useful. From the xbox side the problem manifest in the video output just hanging. the interface tries to continue for a bit and you can hit the fast forward and rewind and you can see it moving up and down the progress bar at the bottom, but the video remains hung. If you shutdown the 360 and restart it will connect but when you playback it will say there are no codecs available to handle the file format. It's interesting to note that the original ehshell.exe does not go away and a new one is spawned. This appears at first blush to be a problem with the mpeg2 video decoder. Were there significant changes made in sp1 to the decoder?

I'd love to give you exact details but am unwilling to reinstall SP1 to find out, my family relies on the mce and mce extender remaining UP.
The media center pc I am using is homegrown so this is likely not useful information to you.

The network card is Broadcom netxtreme gigabit ethernet adapter. (which could be part of the problem, I have had problems with broadcom in the past)

My problem is that videos streaming to the Xbox 360 will freeze at random times.  Once frozen, the internet connection itself at the PC will drop.  After several minutes, the Xbox will go to the green screen saying the connection was dropped.  I need to reboot the PC and/or the router to regain internet connection.  The shutdown time on the PC is exorbitantly long after these situations.

I too am inclined to point to SP1 as being the culprit.  For both Vista Home Premium 32- and 64-bit, these problems are commonplace upon installing SP1.  It has gotten to a point that I am manually updating the PC and allowing only critical updates to install.  SP1 and all non-critical updates are not installed.  Without SP1, I may have encountered 3 hangups and I believe that may be a data overload on the router.  It might bear noting that this problem only occurred with movies and not with photos or music files.

Try as I might, I am absolutely sick of trouble-shooting this problem.  I have decided to just stick to my current setup and prevent SP1 from installing.

I am running an HP slimline Athlon 64 X2 2.3 GHz  w/ 4GB ram, 8600GT 512 mb DDR2 video card, and a Raptor 150GB HD.  The movies, all in DVR-MS format, are stored in an external dual enclosure connected via USB 2.0.  The PC is streaming wirelessly via a Belkin USB g adapter to a Belkin 802.11g router.  The Xbox is connected to the router via ethernet.