Actually Critical Failure would be more like it

Having not used our Media Center PC as a Media Center PC for quite a while, I was incredibly frustrated when I tried to use it and had the Media Center functions fail with a wide array of cryptic and just plain unhelpful errors. Most of them "critical".

It seems that I blindly (and foolishly) installed the service packs that have become available over the past months, never checking to see if Media Center itself still worked. Which it clearly didn't.

Lots of time and web/newsgroup searching later, it appears as if somehow some of the bewildering number of dlls became unregistered (or perhaps the wrong ones were registered - one can never be quite sure what's going on in the world of COM).

To the rescue, however, comes MceRepair which, according to the author's blog will:

• Repair the ACLs to get COM+ Services working again (see KB909444)
• Repair the registration for .NET Framework v1.1 libraries (should fix the "Entry Point Not Found in mscoree.dll" error during registration).
• Reinstalls all MCE Windows Services
• Re-registers COM components of MCE
• Reinstalls managed assemblies into the GAC
• Recreates native images for managed assemblies (ngen)

Sure enough, running this, rebooting and restarting Media Center fixed the problem(s).

Thank you, so much.

Also helpful, if you're unfortunate enough to find yourself in the situation of trying to get your Media Center PC working again, is this link:

Aaron Stebner's WebLog : Media Center guide download errors and suggested fixes