WMS Idle ending program dialogs at windows shutdown… NOT the same old problem!
I’ve been seeing this a lot lately on new system builds. All of the research I’ve done has pointed to it being an issue with MS Office/Outlook, some involving Communicator, many listing other similar errors on just about all 9x/NT versions of Windows and even Office dating back to Office 97! Service packs and updates do not seem to matter. None of this is helping the issue on my systems today. So it was time to take action and go beyond google, use the old noodle.
Surely, the systems that I have observed it on have one or more common denominators: Windows XP and Office 03 or 07. Ending task at shutdown produces no side effects, yet not ending the task will get you a big fat refusal to shutdown; nothing is written to the system event logs. Is this your trouble? Read on!
Using a superb tool called Process Explorer, (credit: Sysinternals now owned by Microsoft, see www.microsoft.com/sysinternals) I decided to search for the handle, and sure enough what pops up? NMIndexStoreSvr is the offending process, which is started via the NMIndexingService service. What’s this? The other common denominator! Sweet!
Nero Scout, my friends. Included with Nero 7, it is akin to Microsoft or Google’s Desktop Search software, except that it’s possibly more of a processor hog and only bothers with your “media” files. At least with the OEM versions of Nero 7 Essentials bundled with so many optical drives on the market, there is no option to not install it! There is no option to uninstall it after the fact, and disabling it doesn’t really disable it either, as the services continue to run and the icon stays in your “My Computer” view. The WMS Idle error stays, too.
There may be a patch, I don’t really care. If you do, track it down on Nero’s site or beg their customer support to look for a fix. For performance reasons, I always opt to remove Nero Scout with my client’s permission, provided they understand they are loosing all that great functionality and will actually have to click on their “My Documents” folder and go to the subs from there to find their media, or search the old fashioned way. big whoop.
To remove Nero Scout there are quite a few suggestions elsewhere on the net, but rarely are they complete and usually just “disable” the functionality and remove the icon. I like to be a bit more complete than that. This is what I do to rid the system of Nero Scout’s offending integration and the WMS Idle error.
First, “disable” Nero Scout (via right-click on icon in systray or my computer)
Then perform these steps: (you can copy+paste this and save as a batch file, lines numbered in case of wrapping, obviously you would remove them if you save as a batch file. In case of error, you may want to create a system restore point or back up your registry before proceeding.)
1 net stop NMIndexingService
2 regsvr32 /u “%commonprogramfiles%\Ahead\LibMediaLibraryNSE.dll”
3 sc config NMIndexingService start=disabled
4 reg delete “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\
5 reg delete “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\
6 reg delete “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\
7 reg delete “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\
8 reg delete “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\
9 reg delete “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\
the batch is tested on WinXP only and needs no external components to function on that OS. Naturally it will not work on a non-NT based OS or even Win2000 without the reg.exe utility from the resource kit. When in doubt, do it the manual way, you should be able to figure it out based on this batch. Lines 4-5 are probably useless but I threw them in there just in case. You could take it a step further and just delete the NMIndexingService from the registry.
Alternately, if you actually USE Nero Scout, you could create a simple logoff script (a bit easier to implement in WinXP Pro with group policies) to just stop the offending services. A simple net stop NMIndexingService and net stop NMIndexStoreSvr and maybe a wait timer routine for a few seconds (but likely not needed) should do the job.
If your problem met the criteria (Nero Scout, Office) you’ve likely just solved the WMS Idle error!
cheers!
1 Comment
Leave your reply.