Vista SP1 Windows Media Center TV Pack Makes Search for TV Content Useless

Microsoft has released Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008 to manufacturing in mid-July 2008, and the problems have already begun to emerge for the Windows media Center update. The Redmond company indicated that on machines with Windows Media Center TV Pack installed, following the finalization of the "Set up TV" process, users of the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista RTM and SP1, could find it impossible to search for television content.

"Assume that you are running Windows Media Center TV Pack on a Windows Vista-based computer. When you try to search for television content by using an element such as the title, a keyword, an actor, or a director, you may not receive any results. If you run the search immediately after you finish the "Set up TV" process, this is the expected behavior because the indexing process takes some time. However, even about four hours after the "Set up TV" process is complete, you may still be unable to search for television content," Microsoft informed.

The Redmond giant is not offering a resolve at this point in time, outside of delivering mitigations to help users deal with the issue. "This problem occurs when a Windows Media Center request to index the search root of the Media Center Guide is dropped," the company explained. And in order to resolve it, Vista Home Premium and Ultimate users can either upgrade to Windows Search 4.0 or re-index the search root in Windows Search 3.

Windows Search 4.0 can be downloaded via this link right here on Softpedia. Navigating to Control Panel - Indexing Options users need to verify that the Windows Media Center index location is present. Next, in a command prompt window opened with administrative privileges, type cd %windir%ehome and then ehprivjob /DoRegisterSearch, pressing Enter after each command. Additionally, through the Advanced menu in Indexing Options, users can rebuild the entire index of Windows Vista to include the television content for Windows Media Center with TV Pack 2008 installed. The cd %windir%ehome and ehprivjob /DoRegisterSearch commands serve to re-index the search root and can also be performed in Windows Search 3.