Saturday, February 25, 2006

Xbox 360 Extender: My "Session Terminated" Cause Identified

Before Greg Huber and I presented on Media Center for GANG, I had built a MCE box that was clean and contained everything that we needed for the presentation. Before (at the Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp), we had his MCE PC, his laptop, and my laptop, and experienced all kinds of technical issues trying to network everything together for the presentation.

The box worked great, and was all set to go. Well, that was until I tried to connect my XBox 360 to it (which was needed for part of the presentation).

I ran through the PCSETUP program, and everything seemed fine. But, when the XBox attempted to connect to the Media Center session, I would always get a "Session Terminated" error. I tried for hours that day to get the connection to work, but everything failed. Then, when I tried to systematically remove one installed program at a time (hoping that it was my DVD software, or something else that was 3rd party), I ended up hosing the box big-time.

So, we ended up reverting back to Greg's MCE machine and both of our laptops... :(

I recently paved that machine and reinstalled everything. But, wouldn't you know it, the "Session Terminated" problem was still there! However, this time, I had the opportunity to dig deeper into the problem, since I wasn't pushing up against the start time of a presentation.

I was actually able to determine that a GeForce FX5200 was at fault. In order to promote discussion, I detailed the situation on The Green Button:

http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/shwmessage.aspx?ForumID=58&MessageID=157807