History Log Crashes Media Center

[ghostman]

I was trying to diagnose a recording error, so I went to review my Recording History. As soon as I select History, Media Center crashed. I tried again and Media Center crashed again. Then I tried reading the log from the Windows event viewer (the log called Mediacenter) and it came up with an error and had to quit.

It seems pretty obvious that there's a corruption in the log file. Does anyone know where that file lives? Do I need to stop any services before I remove the file? Will the file self regenerate or do I need to touch a blank file for it to start logging to?

Thanks.

[CyberSimian]

Does anyone know where that file lives?

In the Event Log Manager, there is a log-file management panel that allows you to specify several options regarding the log files, such as:

(1) Maximum size of log file.
(2) What happens when a log file becomes full.
(3) Reset log file.

I don't remember exactly where it is, so you will need to click on everything in sight until you find it. If the Event Log Manager abends before you can get to this panel, the event log files have an extension of "EVT", so search for those and delete the ones that seem relevant.

Curio: WMC on Vista does not wrap event log files correctly. When the log file becomes full, one option is to wrap around to the beginning and start overwriting the oldest entries. The problem is that WMC gets out of step with the Event Manager, with the result that the most-recent few recordings are always missing from the WMC History panel. Resetting the log file fixes this, as does not using wrapping log files. I don't know whether Win7/8 also suffer from this problem.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[ghostman]

Thanks CyberSimian! You're correct, not the easiest thing to find. But it was definitely a corrupt log file and resetting the log in the Event Viewer fixed the issue.