Media Center Extender Abruptly Drops

[Jimmersd]

As other people have observed, the Echo has a nasty habit of freezing requiring a reboot. I am no stranger to this.

I have configured my system about a well as I can, considering.

The basic configuration of my network consists of a TPLink TLR600VPN Router, TLSG3210 Switch, 2 HDHR Primes/corresponding cable-cards and Adapters. 2 Ceton Echos in separate locations each sharing access along with Roku's connected through Netgear GS105 Dumb-switches. The HTPC is a headless LGA1155 i3 Windows 7 Pro box. I have intentionally over engineered this system to remove any question of headroom causing problems. Network or otherwise eg: 16g ram in the box, 240g SSD primary drive and a 1TB 7200rpm Recording drive. CAT6 Wires, Jumpers and surge suppressors/protectors.

I had configured my switch with Spanning Tree Protocols to reduce the possibility of packet storms or other unwanted network garbage and had assigned static address' to all devices on the network. There is no dynamic addressing. HTPC is used for TV services only.

I still had to deal with the occasional freeze or network error box popping up in the upper right hand corner.

After checking the System Log on the HTPC I found that there is near constant chatter between one of the Echos and my Windows box.

Here is the interesting part. The chatter occurs when the Echo is in standby/off mode. It consisted of a Event ID 117 Media Center Extender Session Enforcement warning that the Extender user was abruptly disconnected followed directly by an Event ID 1530 showing that the User Profile Service registry key for a printer, was open. This would continue until the Second Echo was switched on.

There is no printer installed on this computer or network.

So I started doing some digging and found that to a large degree Windows can allow services to misbehave when dealing with Media Center Extenders. Since the Echo is designed to use Remote Desktop, Windows can allow any device or application that wants, to try to make contact with the extender device. So after some more digging I was able to find a method to disable the spurious printer User Profile Service Warnings this was related to Printer Redirect under Remote Desktop. http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1 ... sktops-msc

This resolved part of the problem. Half of the spurious warnings have ceased. But the Media Center Extender is still disconnecting/reconnecting repeatedly. While the Echo is in power down mode.

Now here's the interesting bit. The freezes have completely stopped. Neither am I having problems with network errors. So there's that.

I wonder how many issues with the echo are related to unneeded/misbehaving services on the network and the HTPC causing communication problems?

I contacted Ceton Support and opened a ticket but as of yet haven't been able to resolve the disconnect problem.

Hope this helps someone.