Hello, all. This is my first post, so forgive me if I'm rehashing an old, played-out issue.

I've just spent an entire three days trying to fix an error that occurred suddenly and virtually closed my home-based business down. It may have started a few weeks ago, when suddenly, Easy Media Creator 7 began trying to force me to install Napster. Basically, every time I started the photo editing program, the install would begin automatically and would take about six clicks on the cancel button to finally stop. Once it stopped, the entire Roxio program would freeze and I'd have to restart. After a whole lot of blind tweaking, I finally deleted the Napster component from my EMC files (I had set up Roxio to install without Napster, so go figure) and the problem appeared to go away.

But then, I suppose as punishment, both my CD/DVD reader and CD/DVD burner stopped spinning and showed up in MY COMPUTER with scary yellow exclamation points next to them. I deleted and reloaded the drivers several times without success and then finally found a fix online that involved deleting "high filters" and "low filters." I never even knew what these were until then.

Things seemed to be OK until three days ago, when I suddenly couldn't burn a bunch of Walmart.com tracks to CD using Windows Media Player (apparently the only way to do it.) No matter what I did, WMP kept telling me there was no burner installed. Just because I really needed to upset my stomach ulcer that particular day, I decided to check whether Roxio's Creator Classic would read the drive. Of course, it didn't.

I don't want to relive the whole scenario of the next few days, so I will summarize by saying that, after two sleepless nights in front of the computer, trying to weed through all kinds of useless techno babble from people who posted answers without bothering to understand the questions, I found this forum. By this point, I had deleted and reinstalled both Roxio 7 and Windows Media Player at least a dozen times each and was resigned to living with a computer that could never again write to a CD. Then I read a post that suggested I download a patch called pxengine1_08_34a.exe . It appeared to be a patch for Easy Media Creator 8, but I tried it with 7 anyway. Within minutes, Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 read my CD/DVD burner again and I was ecstatic. (Windows Media Player was another issue, as it continued to insist the burner was not there.)

Anyway, now that I'm on the other side of this nightmarish issue, I'd like to know if anyone else has solved this problem in the same manner, and whether I can expect the problem to be fixed for good. Also, if you have any suggestions for getting the drive to work with Windows Media Player again, I'd like to hear it.

Thanks!

The pxengine patch has worked for me on 3 different computers when an uninstall of EMC 'lost' the drives.

As to why the drives won't work with WMP, I don't know. If it's a burn issue, you might be running into DRM which is a protection built into some songs. I don't know what the limitations are on songs downloaded from WalMart.

Tom, roll that Windows Media Player 11 back to 10, and if you have Internet Explorer 7 on your computer, roll that back to IE 6. Both WMP 11 and IE 7 effectively kill the video editing (and other) capabilities of EMC 7. 7.5, and 8.