Sunday, November 29, 2009

Windows Media Center refuses to start

I'm having some problems getting Windows Media Center to start on my machine. Whenever I click on it, it complains that "Windows Media Center has been closed because it does not support running in portrait mode. You must restore landscape mode in order to use Windows Media Center."

The funny thing is that on this machine, one of my two monitors is in landscape mode. WMC should just use that one... but it doesn't.

Two obvious solutions:
1) Ditch the second monitor, or disable it, or switch it to landscape mode when running WMC. These options are not that great.

2) The geek way is to tweak the registry;) By deleting the "monitor" value from "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\MCE.PerUserSettings" I can force WMC to start on my primary (landscape) monitor. If you don't know how to use regedit, there are lots of tutorials available.