At first I thought this was an issue on just one computer. Now I have two with the exact same condition. Nothing I’ve tried so far as fixed it. Now I’m afraid, if it can happen to them, it could happen to all of them.
All of our workstations are running Windows 7 Pro 64bit with MS Office 2010 64bit. We purchased all of the workstations at the same time so they all match. They have whatever version Windows Media Player that came with them. I can’t find the Help>About.
Here’s what happens:
Our users get voice messages as WAV file attachments to their emails. Never been a problem until about two months back. One user complained he “couldn’t hear his voice messages.” I assume it meant a volume issue. I had to wait until he was out of the office to work on his computer in his office. Not something I could do via remote. When I went there, logged in as him, and ran a WAV file from an email it worked fine. Came up and could hear it. I was perplexed. I followed up with an email to him to say I couldn’t find a problem. He eventually responded that it doesn’t always happen. Odd. A week or so goes by and he says it’s happening again. That time I was in the office so I ran up to his office right away so I could see first hand. What happened is it wasn’t coming up at all. No WMP. Checked the task manager and so see the wmplayer.exe in the list of processes. Running at about 13% CPU and roughly 17k memory. Never comes up so I end task. I tried rebooting but still wouldn’t work. The only way I could get the WAV file to play was to save it to the user’s WMP Library, open WMP, and run the WAV from the library. I thought it might have been a file association but unassociating and then reassociating WAV files didn’t resolve it. Even though the WAV files are all uniquely named, I tried emptying the Outlook cache, believing it might be an Outlook problem. Didn’t make any difference.
Yesterday, a second user called with the same problem. Nothing happens when trying to listen to WAV from email. That user also could not get a MP4 video to run even though it should (tested and worked fine for me on my computer). That tells me it’s not an Outlook issue. I tried clearing the WMP privacy cache. I tried uninstalling WMP, reboot, and reinstalling. I tried changing WAV file association to a different program (could run WAV from Outlook) then switching association back to WMP (back to not being able to run from Outlook). I tried running the configuration troubleshooter. I tried using a utility to reregister the DLLs. I tried logging the user in with local administrator rights. Nothing worked. I gave up yesterday and installed VLC media player on the user’s computer to get her moving again.
Has anyone seen this issue? Suggestions?
