How to re-enable the Create CD/DVD item in Media Center

I heard from 2 customers yesterday who had both run into an issue on their Media Center 2005 systems. They had navigated to the More Programs menu in the Media Center start menu and inadvertantly chose to remove the Create CD/DVD item from the menu by clicking the More Info button and choosing the Remove option. They tried several options but could not figure out how to add it back, and asked how to restore the item to the menu on their system.

I tried this out on my Media Center 2005 system, and restoring this menu item was trickier than I expected. Here is what I had to do to re-enable the Create CD/DVD option on the More Programs menu:

  1. Close Media Center
  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd
  3. Run reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Extensibility\Categories\Listmaker\Disc Burning\{1beb699f-dc1e-41a7-a31a-d4b339d21f42}" /v Enabled /t REG_SZ /d True /f
  4. Re-open Media Center and navigate to More Programs to verify that the Create CD/DVD option appears in the list again

There is a button under Settings | General | More Programs Options named Edit More Programs that is designed to allow you to show or hide items in the More Programs list, but unfortunately, I found that this menu item does not work correctly in all cases. In this particular instance, the Create CD/DVD option was installed as an extensibility application for all users (meaning the settings are located under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE). However, when you choose to remove the item in the More Programs menu, Media Center sets an Enabled registry value to False under HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

It appears that the HKEY_CURRENT_USER setting will override the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE setting, which causes the menu item to be hidden. It also appears that the Edit More Programs button in the Settings section of Media Center tries to change the registry value under the hive where the application was originally registered, which in the case of Create CD/DVD is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. I will have to try some experiments with this functionality in the current builds of Media Center that we are working on and report a bug to get this fixed for the future if it is still happening there.