I don't understand the problem when playing any media files

Ok, so I'm hoping someone can tell me what's going on, because my ninja-google skills haven't turned up anything.

So this is the problem. I will select a media file, either a mp3 or a avi file or whatever, then hit enter to play it. I can hear the file playing, however, nothing comes up.

However, when I manually click on the shortcut to WMP11, it comes up and I see that file that has been playing.

What the heck is going on?

 

What version of Windows are you using and do you have the 'Windows Media Player' toolbar enabled in your task manager?

 

Ok, WOW.

As soon as I disabled the toolbar, everytime I click on a file to play it, WMP now comes up on its own.

So is this a bug or something? I don't have this problem on my other machine, which is XP Pro and WMP10: I have the toolbar enabled on it and everything comes up on its own like its supposed to.

 

No it's not a bug. In my previous post I meant to say 'toolbar' not 'task manager' sorry . Right click the toolbar, highlight "toolbars" and uncheck "Windows Media Player".

This is a feature designed by Microsoft. Some people like it, some don't .

 

No no, that I understand. I enabled the toolbar on this machine because often I have a huge mp3 list just playing in the background, and I don't want the window open. So I'm aware of this feature.

But my problem is that when its enabled and WMP11 is off, if I click some video file or audio to play, the window will not come up. Whereas on the other machine with XP Pro and WMP10, the window WILL come up, even though the toolbar is enabled. Only when the toolbar is off will the WMP's window come up on this machine, which is a problem since if I'm trying to play a video, I won't see any video until I click on WMP.

 

I'm guessing you're using Vista on this machine then? I have XP PRO and WMP11 and it seems to do what you want. I don't know about Vista though... For me when I want it to display full screen I can just click "restore" on the WMP11 toolbar. Maybe Vista is different .

 

Yea, Vista Home Premium SP1 is on this machine.

Hope someone else can chime in, cause it will be a pain in the ass to have to turn off the toolbar every time I'm done playing music in it just so I can have the window come up the next time when I need to play a video file.