Workaround: Windows Media Player sound cuts out when Cisco VPN client v4.x is active

I had the opportunity to work from home today.  It was nice to change up my routine and get a good bit of mostly-uninterrupted work done.  The best part was probably getting to spend a full hour at lunchtime having lunch with my wife Melissa and my kids!

I did run into two issues during the course of day, though.  One was that the Charter cable modem service decided to go out for an hour or so in the afternoon (and the VOIP phone service along with it); there wasn't much I could do about that aside from work offline and wait it out.

The other issue was a strange one; while listening to mp3s on my local C: drive in Windows Media Player 11 (WMP), the playback would work fine for a minute or two, but then the sound would cut out.  The song would still apparently be playing (as evidenced by the track position slider continuing to advance), but I'd get only silence from my speakers or earphones.  Sounds from other Windows apps would still play as normal.  If I clicked Stop and then Play in WMP, or Previous Track / Next Track, the sound would come back for another minute or two, and then cut out again.  This behavior happened regardless of whether WMP was minimized or not, or whether it was in full mode or skin mode. 

I also noticed that when the sound playback cut out, the wmplayer.exe process (the Windows Media Player process) would peg the CPU it was running on; I could see in Task Manager that one of the two CPUs (on my dual-core machine) would go to 100% utilization, with wmplayer.exe accounting for 50% of my overall CPU usage (100% of 1 of the 2 CPUs).  If I stopped the playback or brought the sound back by clicking Previous Track / Next Track, the CPU utilization would go back to normal (less than 5%).  I tried pointing SysInternals' Process Monitor at wmplayer.exe while WMP was in the "pegged" state, but it didn't turn up any errors or any behavior that I could readily identify as unusual.

Since I use Windows Media Player on my laptop docked at my desk at work every day, I figured that the problem was probably related either to working with the laptop undocked, or else had something to do with my VPN connection to my office's intranet.  I ended up just getting out my iPod and listening to my music on that instead as a workaround.

At the end of the day, though, I came back and investigated the issue.  (It just bugs me when something on my machine isn't working the way it should be!)  Various Google web searches for combinations of terms including "windows media player", "100% cpu", "sound cuts out", and "vpn" didn't turn up anything useful, but when I searched for "vpn" on the microsoft.public.windowsmedia.player newsgroup, I came across what turned out for me to be the key to the solution: a 2005 post by "bsmaloney" describing nearly-identical behavior to what I was seeing.  bsmaloney didn't post a solution, but he mentioned that he was using a version 4.x Cisco VPN client.  This is what I was using as well!  It hadn't occurred to me up to that point that the problem might be attributable to a specific vendor's VPN implementation, rather than the fact that I was connected via a VPN in general.

I went back to Google and searched on "windows media player" vpn cisco, and sure enough, the #1 result was a Cisco VPN client release notes page listing that an issue related to Windows Media Player playback had been fixed in version 5.0.00.0340 of the Cisco client.  The release notes also mentioned that the problem would occur when either the SRS WOW or Graphic Equalizer were enabled.

It wasn't an option for me to upgrade to version 5 of the Cisco VPN client, since the standard at my office is still the 4.x version.  However, I checked in WMP, and I did in fact have the Graphic Equalizer enabled.  I turned that off (View menu | Enhancements | Graphic Equalizer), and playback has been working fine since then!

As a side note, the Cisco release notes page refers to the bugs it describes as "caveats."  I thought that was kind of cute.  "Defects" and "issues" I've heard of before, but the using term "caveats" to describe software bugs was a new one on me!