Strange Network Traffic From Movie Maker

[Super Steve]

I've got a small home network consisting of 3 computers, all running
Windows XP.

I use only one of my computers for running Movie Maker.

All of the computers run a network traffic monitoring tool called
NetMeter that shows me a nice graph of network traffic (both internal
to my LAN and also external to the Internet). It uses different
colours to show incoming or outgoing traffic.

Whenever I start up Movie Maker I immediately see lots of outgoing
traffic from the PC running Movie Maker, and lots of incoming traffic
to one of the other computers. The traffic continues for as long as
I'm using Movie Maker, and when I exit Movie Maker then the traffic
stops. So I'm pretty sure the traffic is being generated by Movie
Maker and not something else.

If I shut down the PC that's receiving all of the traffic then Movie
Maker doesn't complain, no error messages or anything like that.

The traffic isn't huge, about 9KB/s. But it's continuous and never
ending.

The movies that I'm editing are all on the same PC as Movie Maker is,
so I'm not opening files over the network.

I'm pretty sure that this behaviour started after I once accidentally
opened a movie file over the network, although this may just be a
coincidence that this behaviour started soon afterwards.

I think that maybe Movie Maker remembered that I once opened something
over the network and it's trying to locate the file again, even though
the file has long gone. I've tried looking for a list of Most
Recently Used files for Movie Maker, thinking that I might be able to
spot the other PC's UNC name in the path, but I can't find anything
like that.

I've used a program called psfile from sysinternals.com that shows
files opened remotely, but nothing shows up as being open from the
remote PC.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

Can anyone suggest what Movie Maker may be doing or how I can stop it?

 

[John Inzer]

I've got a small home network consisting of 3 computers, all running
Windows XP.

I use only one of my computers for running Movie Maker.

All of the computers run a network traffic monitoring tool called
NetMeter that shows me a nice graph of network traffic (both internal
to my LAN and also external to the Internet). It uses different
colours to show incoming or outgoing traffic.

Whenever I start up Movie Maker I immediately see lots of outgoing
traffic from the PC running Movie Maker, and lots of incoming traffic
to one of the other computers. The traffic continues for as long as
I'm using Movie Maker, and when I exit Movie Maker then the traffic
stops. So I'm pretty sure the traffic is being generated by Movie
Maker and not something else.

If I shut down the PC that's receiving all of the traffic then Movie
Maker doesn't complain, no error messages or anything like that.

The traffic isn't huge, about 9KB/s. But it's continuous and never
ending.

The movies that I'm editing are all on the same PC as Movie Maker is,
so I'm not opening files over the network.

I'm pretty sure that this behaviour started after I once accidentally
opened a movie file over the network, although this may just be a
coincidence that this behaviour started soon afterwards.

I think that maybe Movie Maker remembered that I once opened something
over the network and it's trying to locate the file again, even though
the file has long gone. I've tried looking for a list of Most
Recently Used files for Movie Maker, thinking that I might be able to
spot the other PC's UNC name in the path, but I can't find anything
like that.

I've used a program called psfile from sysinternals.com that shows
files opened remotely, but nothing shows up as being open from the
remote PC.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

Can anyone suggest what Movie Maker may be doing or how I can stop it?

===================================
I don't recall seeing this question before...but
maybe one or both of the following file types
are what you are looking for:

MEDIATAB1.DAT

MSWMM

The following article offers some info about them:

A Source File - from Cradle to Grave
http://www.papajohn.org/Newsletters/060-SourceFile.html


--


John Inzer MS-MVP
Digital Media Experience

Notice
This is not tech support
I am a volunteer

Solutions that work for
me may not work for you

Proceed at your own risk

 

[Super Steve]

Thanks John. I located the MEDIATAB1.DAT file and looked at it with a
hex editor and I did indeed find references to the remote PC that is
receiving all of the unusual traffic, and I even found a reference to
the file that I accidentally opened over the network.

The page you pointed me to talks about references to old files
building up in the MEDIATAB1.DAT file, but unfortunately it doesn't
say how to remove old references. He did say that he has asked
Microsoft for a comment, but there it ends... I guess I could just
change the PC name in the old reference, being careful not to change
the length, and that at least should cause Movie Maker to look
elsewhere for the file. I think I'll give that a go and see what
happens.

 

[John Inzer]

Thanks John. I located the MEDIATAB1.DAT file and looked at it with a
hex editor and I did indeed find references to the remote PC that is
receiving all of the unusual traffic, and I even found a reference to
the file that I accidentally opened over the network.

The page you pointed me to talks about references to old files
building up in the MEDIATAB1.DAT file, but unfortunately it doesn't
say how to remove old references. He did say that he has asked
Microsoft for a comment, but there it ends... I guess I could just
change the PC name in the old reference, being careful not to change
the length, and that at least should cause Movie Maker to look
elsewhere for the file. I think I'll give that a go and see what
happens.

===================================
If you don't mind clearing the Collections folder
in Movie Maker...you can rename or delete the
MEDIATAB1.DAT file...Movie Maker will create
a new one the next time you launch it. Maybe
that would clear up the issue.

--


John Inzer MS-MVP
Digital Media Experience

Notice
This is not tech support
I am a volunteer

Solutions that work for
me may not work for you

Proceed at your own risk

 

[PapaJohn]

My reference to asking Microsoft about residual older info was to the
project .MSWMM file, not the collection database.

It might come into play if your settings include auto-opening the last
project file you worked with when opening Movie Maker.

--
website references are to www.papajohn.org

PapaJohn (MVP)


Thanks John. I located the MEDIATAB1.DAT file and looked at it with a
hex editor and I did indeed find references to the remote PC that is
receiving all of the unusual traffic, and I even found a reference to
the file that I accidentally opened over the network.

The page you pointed me to talks about references to old files
building up in the MEDIATAB1.DAT file, but unfortunately it doesn't
say how to remove old references. He did say that he has asked
Microsoft for a comment, but there it ends... I guess I could just
change the PC name in the old reference, being careful not to change
the length, and that at least should cause Movie Maker to look
elsewhere for the file. I think I'll give that a go and see what
happens.