Windows Valley

by

Ramesh Kumar

Disable Windows Media Player Network Sharing and Configuration application (wmpnscfg.exe)

Windows Media Player v11 and v12 provides a feature to share media between different computers on the same network, and can even share media with other devices as well. So if you are not using this features you should or can disable it to free up some KB of RAM.

How To:

1. First of all, you have to disable Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service. So Open up Services from Control Panel, or type services.msc into the start menu search/run box. Find the service in the list:

Disable Media Sharing Service

2. Open it up by double-click on it, and then change the service start up to Disabled.

3. Now Its done ! but if you still facing some start up problem with wmpnscfg.exe, then follow these simple registry editing. Open Registry Editor.

4. Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\HME

5. There should be two DWORD values called DisableBrowse and DisableDiscovery. Now just create or modify these values and set these to 1 and 2 respectively.

Disable Autmatice File Discovery

6. Restart your PC to take effect.

Applies To:

  • Windows Media Player 11 (Windows Vista and Windows XP)
  • Windows Media Player 12 (Windows 7)

3 responses to “Disable Windows Media Player Network Sharing and Configuration application (wmpnscfg.exe)”

  1. Benjamin Goulart Avatar
    Benjamin Goulart

    It seems to be screwing up my ASIO latency having just set a laptop up and it initially working perfectly. I just added a network on the laptop connecting it to a desktop and all hell broke loose on my audio software. I don’t see an option in Media Player to stop this and ending the task in Task Manager doesn’t help since it restarts the process again. Microsoft really wants to shove this media sharing server and Media Player stuff down your throat at every opportunity. Reminds me of the antitrust actions taken against them with their shenanigans concerning RealPlayer. All I wanted to do was transfer some files over some cat 5 cable. And here I thought completely disabling all the desktop/visual enhancements was all I needed for good ASIO in Windows…

    Reply
  2. misty Avatar
    misty

    Hi Ramesh,

    Your solution has proven to be working. Thanks! The black monitor is due to a sudden monitor failure a couple of days ago.

    Reply
  3. misty Avatar
    misty

    Ramesh,

    I stopped all the Media Center Services from the Control Panel on Vista. I set DWORD values of DisableBrowse and DisableDiscovery to 1 and 2 respectively per your article. Now, the entire screen has gone black. The last steps has disabled the Windows interface when the system seems to boot up.

    What’s you take on this behavior? Thanks.

    Since I purchased HP pc with Vista pre-installed (I don’t have a copy of it), I decided to buy Windows 7 from Amazon yesterday. But my machine is no longer functional because tweaking the registry.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *