December 29, 2001

Most of my time on my computer the last couple of days has been spent in trying to fix an interesting problem. I have a notebook computer and I have Windows XP running on it and a few days ago I decided to install MusicMatch Jukebox on it since I needed to rip my collection into MP3’s for the sake of portability since I can fit about ten of my music CD’s into one CD-R of MP3’s. I’ve used MusicMatch Jukebox (MMJB) before and I’ve liked it and so I decided to register since the installer I had on my machine was for a fairly old 6.0 version whereas their site said that version 7.0 was out. Of course, I’d installed 6.0 by this time and I’d upgraded the 6.0 installation by this time with the key I received for registering. Everything was working fine so far. I then proceeded to use their software update option from inside MMJB and upgraded to 7.0 and when I ran the app for the first time, wham! Crash!

I’ve been trying various combinations since then. I’ve uninstalled MMJB completely, downloaded their 7.0 installer and tried that – crash! I’ve installed 6.0 and installed 7.0 over that – crash! Some people would say that since 6.0 works fine that I should leave well enough alone … but the problem is that 6.0 works but only up to a point <vbg> What I mean is that 6.0 works fine normally but it doesn’t detect that I’ve changed a CD after ripping it – so I need to close MMJB and restart it again each time I change the CD. In addition to that, somewhere along the way this seems to have messed up my Windows setup as well since now I can’t shutdown my machine completely – somewhere along the shutdown process it just locks up and I have to power off manually.

I wrote to MusicMatch tech support since their main option of tech support seems to be from inside MMJB itself and I can’t use that option with 7.0 and that’s where my problems were. Since I registered on Christmas day and all these problems started then, obviously there was no response that day except for a canned message. There was no response the next day or the next day either. I finally heard from them yesterday and they wanted me to send them certain log files from the MMJB installation and describe the problem to them in detail. I’d gone back to 6.0 for the moment since I really needed to get those CD rips done and so I installed 7.0 over that and sent them the info and then went back to 6.0 but the problems still keep bugging me.

I did some further checks last night and suddenly noticed that my CD-RW drive had some new drivers – in addition to the signed XP drivers, there were a few unsigned files as well. A few of them were from Adaptec EasyCD (which I also use) but there was one from MusicMatch named MxlW2k.sys. I was immediately suspicious of that and did a search on Google for the file name and came up with one entry where somebody mentioned that their machine locked up because that file got corrupted. I deleted the file and rebooted and I had no CD-ROM drive because that file had inserted itself into the driver chain and was now missing but my lockups on shutdown problem had disappeared – so MxlW2k.sys must be the culprit! I installed MMJB 7.0 so that I would get the latest MxlW2k.sys file and I got my CD-ROM drive back and the lockups on shutdown were gone as well but still no working MMJB! Today I’m gonna try installing 6.0 over the existing 7.0 and see if that will retain the updated MxlW2k.sys file and let me work with MMJB 6.0 without the CD change detection problems … Ah the joys of software :p

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Posted by Fahim at 9:05 am  |  2 Comments