Installing .NET Framework 2.0 breaks Windows Media Center

Aaron Stebner's WebLog — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 04:08:38 GMT

I got some feedback from Paul Ballard based on my blog post yesterday about why we block users from installing...

re: Why can't I install the .NET Framework SDK v1.0 on Media Center (or Tablet PC for that matter)?

Aaron Stebner — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 21:25:33 GMT

Hey Paul - that is a great question and one I have also been meaning to blog about. I'll answer it here and transfer it to a standalone post later this week.

The short answer is that the version of Media Center we're currently working on will have this fix so that you can install .NET Framework 2.0 and not have it interfere with Media Center functionality.

In the meantime, you can use the following steps to manually fix your machine to work around this issue:

1. Go to %windir%\ehome on your Media Center machine

2. Create files named ehrec.exe.config, ehrecvr.exe.config, ehsched.exe.config, ehshell.exe.config and medctrro.exe.config

3. Open each of these files in notepad and add the following information to them:

<configuration>
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version="v1.0.3705" />
</startup>
</configuration>

4. Restart your machine so that the config file changes will take effect for processes that might have already been running when you created the files

Also, as a convenience, I created copies of these config files with the correct contents. So instead of steps 1-3, you can download the config files from http://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/mce_config_files.zip and extract the contents to %windir%\ehome on your machine and reboot and you should be good to go.

Hope this helps!

re: Why can't I install the .NET Framework SDK v1.0 on Media Center (or Tablet PC for that matter)?

Paul Ballard — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 19:41:06 GMT

It's interesting getting more insight into the deployment issues around the .NET Framework. Do you (or anybody else for that matter) know when we will be able to install a version of the .NET Framework 2.0 on MCE? Currently it blows up the Media Center extensions to XP if you install the Beta 2 (See my blog for more info).

Thanks,
Paul