Mailbag: How can I stop Media Center from losing FM radio presets when rebooting the PC?

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Question:

I have a computer that has Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 installed. Every time I launch the Radio experience and configure FM stations in the 10 preset values, they work fine until I close and re-open Media Center or reboot the computer. How can I fix this?

Answer:

Media Center 2005 stores FM radio presets in the file %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\ehshell.config. It is possible that this file could become corrupt or the logged in user does not have sufficient permissions to update this file for some reason. The following steps can be used to reset this file to attempt to fix this issue:

  1. Close Media Center
  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd
  3. Type cd /d "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome"
  4. Type ren ehshell.config ehshell.config.old
  5. Open Media Center and configure FM radio presets once more

As a side note - in Windows Vista, Media Center will store FM radio presets in the registry instead of in ehshell.config, so this type of file corruption should not affect Media Center functionality in the future. If you upgrade from Media Center 2005 to one of the Windows Vista editions that includes Media Center, any pre-existing FM radio preset values will be automatically read from ehshell.config and inserted into the correct location in the registry.