I have Vista Home Premium SP2 and Media Player 11. In Media Center, the Music->Music Library->Playlists has numerous playlistst that I never created. In particular, there is a "Last 3 episodes of ****", where **** is every show I have setup to record a series of. Many of these playlists are invalid, since I have watched all of the shows, yet a playlist remains for the "Last 3 episodes of ...". I have searched the hard drives for *.wpl files, found the playlists I have created, and some defaults ones in AppData/local/microsoft/mediaplayer/syncplaylists, but deleting them made no difference. How do you prevent these default playlists from being created? It is annoying to have to scroll through dozens of playlists that are invalid to get to the ones that you do want.

thanks

tomkon:

I have Vista Home Premium SP2 and Media Player 11. In Media Center, the Music->Music Library->Playlists has numerous playlistst that I never created. In particular, there is a "Last 3 episodes of ****", where **** is every show I have setup to record a series of. Many of these playlists are invalid, since I have watched all of the shows, yet a playlist remains for the "Last 3 episodes of ...". I have searched the hard drives for *.wpl files, found the playlists I have created, and some defaults ones in AppData/local/microsoft/mediaplayer/syncplaylists, but deleting them made no difference. How do you prevent these default playlists from being created? It is annoying to have to scroll through dozens of playlists that are invalid to get to the ones that you do want.

thanks

Open WMP and delete them from the Library there.

Thanks for the quick reply mikinho, but these default playlists don't appear in WMP, only in Media Center. The ones I created do appear in WMP but not any of the ones I am referring to in the Media Centers playlists.

I'm not sure how this worked in Vista, since I would have to dig to see how it was implemented, but in Windows 7 Media Center recreates the series playlists each time you either load the sync settings page or when a series recording is added. The WPL files are saved to %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\eHome\sync.

You can delete those WPL files, but they will be recreated for new series, and for all series when you go to the sync settings page.

 A workaround for this is to delete the contents of the WPL file you want to "disappear", but leave the file itself. Media Center will read the file and throw an error, but it gets hidden to the user (at least in 7MC), so to the user the playlist should just disappear.

I went to the folder you mentioned, and there were 6 *.wpl files there. I deleted them, restarted Media Center, and those are still there along with about 25 others that I have not created. I have performed advanced searches with (Media Center running and not) for "*.wpl" files and only find the ones that I have created. I even did a search in the Registry and could not find these "mystery" wpl files. I have even tried searching using the name of the show that the playlist is created for in the Registry with no results. It appears that Media Center must be creating these on the fly from some database and not from the usual .wpl file.

I am surprised that more people have not commented on this. Perhaps others do not have this issue and it is just my system build that is causing this, but I have rebuilt the system from scratch and it still created these playlists.

I have done the same to no avail. This is annoying. If anyone has some way to get rid of these playlists (or even find them) let us know. I am using Win7 and it is still the same.

 Agreed.  These playlists are totally stupid.  My music playlists screen is cluttered with "music added in the last month, music auto rated at 5 stars, music played in the last month, music played the most, music rated at 4 or 5 stars".  Does Microsoft really think anyone is using these?  And its not that i mind them including the playlists, but they won't let me delete them.  That's what really gets me.

Come on Microsoft.  Seriously.