Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service Is A (Useless) Resource Hog

Have you ever been working in Windows 7 or Vista and your computer temporarily locks up with the swirling (rotating) icon telling you to wait.  There may not be much of a choice since you may be unable to click on (or activate) anything else on the desktop, and you are forced to wait patiently (or curse with the vulgar repertoire of a drunken sailor).  There are actually a number of issues that may cause this type of problem, and I’m not about to try to troubleshoot your computer, but I will discuss one of the potential causes of this type of problem. 

Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service (WMPNSS) is, for the most part, a useless and resource intensive hog that is present in Windows 7 and Vista.  This service allows Media Player to share media with other computers and UPnP capable appliances on the network.  I would hazard to guess that the majority of users do not use or will ever need this service.  For the small percentage of people that actually make use of this service, please feel free to disregard this advice and move on to something more interesting.

The problems with WMPNSS are:

• It’s always on . . . even when you’re not running Windows Media Player!
• It is resource intensive.  People on the web have reported anywhere between 20 -70 % of their processor usage being eaten up by the random bursts of background activity.  The CPU usage will, of course, depend on the quality of the processor you have.  It also may cause hard drive thrashing (at unexpected times) as it searches and catalogs your media for sharing.
• It wastes memory.  As service always running in the background, it use it a small amount of memory regardless of whether you ever (want to) use the service or not.  Sure, most modern computers have 4 GB or more of memory, but if you have less, or it just bugs you that a useless service is wasting your memory resources, then turn it off.  Users that have actually used WPMNSS (either intentionally or unintentionally) to share their media library on the network have reported memory usage of up to 50% (on a 3 GB RAM system) which, then leads to our next point...  
• It may cause disk thrashing, especially if you have other memory intensive programs (like Adobe Photoshop or video editing software) running.  When memory resources are eaten up, the operating system will have page out to the swapfile more often.  That is why you may encounter some disk thrashing while your system is “locked up” at the same time.

If you check the Services Control Panel, although, the service is set to “manual,” it is always started in Windows 7, which, in effect, makes it one of the “automatic” start services.  One reason for this is probably because of the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) nature of the service.  It needs to be active in order to poll or identify when an UPnP device is plugged in or becomes available on the network.

So, if you don’t intend to use the service, then there’s no reason to leave the service on, especially if it may also be one of the major (or at least contributes to) causes of the lock up problems described at the beginning of this article.  To disable this service, first make sure that it is not activated in WMP.  This step is only necessary for WMP 11 and earlier that came installed on Vista.  If you have WMP 12 or later, this step is unnecessary and you can skip to disabling the background service below.

1. Open WMP, click Tools, Options.
2. Select the "Library" tab, and click "Configure Sharing..."
3. Uncheck "Share my media" and "Find media that others are sharing" checkboxes.
4. Click “OK.”

Now disable the service that is always running in the background:

1.       Click Start.

2.       If you have enabled the show “Administrative Tools” on the Start Menu, click on that in order to find the “Services” option.  Next go to step 5.  If not, go to step 3.

3.       Click on Control Panel.

4.       Click on “System and Maintenance,” and then click “Administrative Tools.”

5.       Double-click Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service and click “Stop.”  Once the service has stopped, set it to “Disabled” and click “OK.”

If you ever have the need to turn the service back on, simply follow the instructions above and set the service to "manual" or "automatic."