Canibus, The email was from a known friend. There were 3 attachments which were pics of the friend and probably this one was also. No, I had not asked for the WMP skin. Just a fluke I guess. I'll do the reinstall tomorrow. Thanks. Sue

What operating system are you using? If your missing that "About" feature, seems like something is wrong, open and close windows media player, reboot the computer, see if you can get that feature back. Windows Media Player 12 comes as part of Windows 7. "In Step 4, you have choice to choose selected file type to play as default with Windows Media Player. You need to click on "Choose defaults for this program" and then select file types that you want to associate with Windows Media Player." See link below,for more on above. Here is a link that might be useful: file types that you want to associate with Windows Media Player.

First I did a restore to remove two updates the evening of September 7, 8:36/8:38. The restore appeared to be successful, but the problem continues. So I restored back about one week and the restore terminated in "...did not complete successfully... system files and settings not changed" It went on to suggest I "temporarily disable anti-virus software" I couldn't find any way to disable Avira AntiVirus. But, I decided to try to view a picture form the desk-top, it worked this time, so I tried a video clip and it too now works. These were the two problems I noted ... go figure. Given I have removed several Microsoft updates, should I now go back to Microsoft and ask for a "Check of Updates"?

Excuse me for not saying thank you for your input above, rude! Sorry, I appreciate it. Yes, it's quite the mystery, one not answered in hundreds of articles and blogs of desperate people trying to make this thing stop. Consuming so much of their time, by the time they finally accomplished this goal, totally distracted from figuring out what the freak it was doing. I didn't forget, so if anyone offers an answer even years from now if this question is still sitting here, I will love to know. The more I learned about what this thing does, trying to get control of its' actions, the more of a mystery it became. I even deleted all of the music files at one point to see if that would do it. Nope, still sharing something. Tried looking up files by last accessed to see what was being shared but couldn't find what I wanted to know in Win explorer. I'm not much of a tweaker, just a user, more and more confused by each passing version of Windows... which always seems more and more determined to completely change everything we know how to do every time. I felt like Roy Scheider at the end of Jaws when I finally rebooted and it was stopped! Once I get back to shore on my scuba tank raft, it will be weeks before the habit of starting every fresh computer session and wake-up from sleep mode with crtl+alt+del to kill all instances of that in the task manager. I'm still not convinced I won't find it running again one of these times. There were subsequent Jaws movies, (quality notwithstanding.)