Three weeks of WMC heck and THIS is what was wrong

[CZ Eddie]

Man, I got the bright idea to upgrade the everythings from Win7 to Win8WMC.
It started off with creating custom ISO's, ditching MS metro apps and other junk.
That kicked off two weeks of WTF why won't anything work properly.
From WMC problems (obviously) to Network sharing issues to a few other things.
This was troubleshooting both a physical desktop as well as a brand new ESXi 6.7 install + WMC server VM based on 8.1.

Then when I finally gave up and went back to Win7WMC, my WMC still wouldn't work.
It was all the same hardware, why why why.
I spent a week t/s that.

In the end, it ended up being not one, but TWO bad HDMI cables.
One on the physical box and one on the ESXi host.
Holy moly what a PITA.
I got every single error message you can possibly have with WMC, depending on which install I was t/s at the time.

Then I came across a random post from someone who had a bad HDMI cable.
So I bought two new cables.
And voila, stuff just works now.
ughhhh.

I guess when I cleaned up my boxes and put everything back together, I must have used the HDMI cables that were previously used on my twin monitor work setup where HDCP wasn't needed.
And they were somehow not HDCP compliant'ish.

I'm so ready for a week long nap.

Btw, my digital cable advisor couldn't start (invalid app) on every single WMC install I tried, from WMC7 to WMC8 to WMC8.1.
That is still a mystery but one that is easy to get past by using the bypass thingy.