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I am sure I covered the registry entries you have listed. I did a search for dvrmst and several other key words that my be in the registry pulse I did an agressive clean with JV16. Also did a file search for any of the dll in the program and deleted those.

At this point I am waiting for version 09 and hoping someone will write an a very good uninstall that will cover all the previous versions.

BTW, I think Vista and Windows ME are the 2 worst programs Microsoft ever wrote.

I am convinced this error is caused by dvrmstoolbox. I noticed the following behaviour on my box:

* Everything work great, incl. my VFD 

* Installs dvrmstoolbox, comercial skip refuses to work.

* At the same time my VFD stops to work.

* Finds this forum/thread. After a little research i learn that MSAS is not sending events ( not going into detail, but it was exacly as described in this thread when it comes to event logs etc)

* Frustrated now. Planning to abondon  dvrmstoolbox and restore VFD functionality.

* Deinstall VFD drivers / software, reboot.

* Reinstall VFD drivers / software.

* BAM! Both VFD and  dvrmstoolbox / comercialskip works!

 

One could argue that the VFD software is the bad guy in this story, but I disagree. It was installed first and was working, and later it fixed what dvrmst broke. Even if you don't have an antec Fusion case, maybe you could try to install the driver and then deactivate if you have the problem mentioned in this thread.

 

http://www.antec.com/download/Fusion_driver.zip 

From what I can gather, I believe I have the same problem as istintaj. I've been trying to figure out what I did to make the issue exhibit itself, but I believe it was the process of uninstalling another MCE plugin.

On my set-up I've got two FireDTV C/CI units hooked up to a Vista Ultimate x86 system and watch and record digital SDTV through MCE and HDTV through DVBViewer (I'm based in Sweden). In the hunt to achieve perfection, I inadvertantly had two FireDTV plugins of different versions installed at the same time. Simply uninstalling the old one seemed to fix all of my other issues, then this issue with the commercial skip addin reared its ugly head.

My tuner units are awesome, but for some reason it's a b¤%ch to setup/tune all the channels, so wiping off all MCE info with tools available on other forums is as unattractive a proposition as reinstalling Vista. That and the fact that I have so much else working so well.

Istintaj and any others out there with the same problem, I'm wondering if you tried uninstalling all MCE plugins and then reinstalling only the ones absolutely necessary including DVRMSToolbox? Barring that, given the sensitivity of the media aggregator, shouldn't there be a reinstall/reregister/upgrade fix of some sort floating around out there that would achieve the same results? I mean reinstalling the whole OS just because one dll (media aggregator) isn't acting like it should seems extreme.

vfd and commercial skipping require msas to be working. 

msas uses sinks to pass media info from WMC, sinks are called in the order that they are registered, if a sink errors msas will not call the next sink in the chain. 

on my pc I have dtb and lcdwriter (a vfd application) both working fine, given that i don't think it's right to point the finger at dtb.

Let me rephrase; I'm not pointing finger to dtb itself but the installation program. I under stand that VFD requires msas working. The VFD WAS working, but the minute I installed dtb it broke, and dtb wasn't working either. Reinstall of VFD fixed BOTH programs. So what I wanted to say was that running the above installation program may help people with the same problem. I don't know what it fixes thoug.

 

And as for calling dtb "the bad guy" I just wanted to point of just that; dfb broke other working apps and reinstall of VFD fixed both. I wasn't complaining about the program itself... Since I got it working I love it, keep up the good work! 

@Quist: Interesting. The only plugin I have installed is Nero's, which I've never used anyhow. I'll try uninstalling it and see what happens - thanks. Beyond that, however, I don't have anything else installed...

@babgvant: Given that the msas sinks are called in the order they are registered and that if one fails, msas will not call the next sink, is there a way to examine the chain and identify the sinks? I'm thinking that perhaps something wasn't installed/uninstalled properly in the past. Or maybe (ideally) there's a way to prioritize the sinks?

I resolved the problem, but unfortunately had to do a clean install of Vista to do so.

I've been running Ultimate as an upgrade from Home Premium. Unfortunately, when I tried an upgrade install, it let me reinstall Ultimate as an upgrade without harming my programs or data, but when it came time to validate it, the validation process of Vista treated it like a clean install. That meant that my upgrade product ID didn't work. Calling their validation number, they said that I had couldn't use an upgrade license for validation with them either. At that point I of course tried to do an upgrade install back to Home Premium, but the installer didn't allow that.

After two days of struggling to get it to work, I gave up and did a reinstall of Home Premium, wiping all of my programs out, but keeping my data intact under Windows.old. Then I still had to call their validation number to validate the OEM Home Premium license I had and confirm it was only used on one computer. Only then could I upgrade back to Ultimate and start the process of reinstalling my apps.

The pain is also installing all of the codecs, tools and reghacks I had to reachieve some semblance of the perfection I had at the beginning of the week. So far so good, but it will take me months to get around to reinstalling all my SW and finding all my product keys. Not very pleased with M$ right now, to say the least.

Now, however, I'm worried about accidently replicating the this ehmsas error unintentionally, and would like to find a better fix or at least a cause. I now have commercial skip working again and pretty much only have my EPG and codec hacks in place. One plugin I'm afraid of reinstalling is the Internet Radio app with all of the Swedish channels as posted here: http://www.tystpc.nu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=559

We used it a lot before, but it wasn't always stable and each station appeared as a plugin from within MCE. And I'm warry of overloading the MCE aggregator.

Still, from a clean install, I can say the MCE experience is a lot different. Tuning my channels in FireDTV only took about 20 minutes, whereas before it would take 90-120 minutes. Restoring the MCE screen down (from full screen), it now presents itself in wide screen mode instead of 4:3 as before, which is nice. Overall, it just seems more stable than before, although with two tuners I still occasionally get the error saying I can only record one show at a time.

Will be watching this thread/site for a solution to this issue and hope to avoid it or be able to better resolve it.

Has anybody come up with a resolution to this problem? I appear to be having the same issue with a broken MSAS...I believe my issue is also related to uninstalling an addin. I recently uninstalled the FireSTB addin because I was no longer using it and it seems that it is now broken. I did some other uninstalling at the same time but I dont think anything that could have caused this.

Are there any ways to fix the MSAS chain without reinstalling vista? I would prefer not to rebuild this machine if I could fix this...
 

So nothing I guess? Can I provide any info to kickstart this issue again? Where else can i post to get help to resolve this issue, is it a MS problem or...?

I'm pretty sure this is dead, or at least on the (way) back burner (see my un-replied-to post #6603 above).  Not enough people are having the issue.  (Misery loves company though, so thanks for posting). :)

As you know, at the moment the choices are to reinstall Vista or live without automatic commercial skipping.  The implication is that it's a problem with Microsoft's implementation of MSAS; I have no idea why they would take a "conveyor belt" approach to it whereby one problem shuts the whole thing down, but then I'm not a developer.  Maybe that's a gross over-simplification of it?

Last I heard Andy submitted the issue to the SANDBOX community, but nothing ever came of it.  That he hasn't posted back here indicates that is still the case.

Maybe (hopefully) Andy will post here with an update; personally, I'm holding out...hoping a future release will (somehow) resolve it.

I've seen two cases where MSAS is broken.

1) Misbehaving Sink: this one is fixable, if you can find out which application is causing the problem.  One way is to search the registry for all MSAS sinks and remove them

2) Never worked: this is the more common scenario where MSAS is broken OOTB.  Here you can reinstall the OS, or try to work your way through PSS.  If you've never dealt with PSS, I think you'll find the first option much less time consuming.  This is made worse by the fact that MSAS has been orphaned in the eHome group, so even if PSS were able to locate a bug it probably wouldn't get fixed.  No one from MS responded to the sandbox posting, and Aaron Stebner suggested the PSS route.

I continue to look for alternative ways to get information about what's happening in the MC shell.  Hopefully I'll find a method that can replace MSAS.

Just wanted to add that I'm currently having this issue. Commercials are detected and xml files are generated even for live recordings. I've enabled the dtb debug flags in the registry and see nothing missing, i.e. exhost* files are there and the plug in seems to be installed and ready to go everytime MC shell is opened. I'm currently disabling FW (working fine) because I don't see any use when it can't skip commercials automatically. I hate to reinstall Vista as I have so much time invested in tweaking it. BTW, I've used dtb on MCE 05 for quite a long time and loved it before hitting this issue with Vista.

Update:

I finally had a chance to play with it some more. I do have vfd as well, and trying unstalling it and reinstalling as suggested by jlo above, it all started to work!

I was skeptical of this at first because I tried so many things including reinstallation of vfd before, but this time it did the trick! So for anybody out there with vfd and having this add-in problem, this is the solution. Wish there was an easy way to debug all this stuff though.

 

 I've got this same issue. I had another auto commerical removing app that I was using, but it didn't allow for converting to wmv. It had a plugin that interacted with Media Center and worked fine.

 I installed this app to give it a try and it just annoys me with an error every time. I have gone back to my other app and will try this again when this issue has been resolved. There's plenty of people with the same issue, but unlike me they can't be bothered signing up just to post that they're having the same issue.

Anyways, please keep us informed and let us know if there is anything we can try.

Cheers

There are different levels of interaction, and different ways to perform it.  The DTB addin uses MSAS to get media events, most of the issues around the addin not working are related to it being broken . 

I thought I'd link this thread to my active thread about this issue to this thread.

http://babgvant.com/forums/t/2083.aspx

I am experiencing exactly the same problem with MSAS failing to send anything to any of the addins.

So far nothing I have tried has fixed the problem.

If anyone knows how to reinstall MSAS and get it working without reinstalling Vista please post.