Removing WMP

[Lex24]

Is it safe to completely remove Windows Media Player and later replace it with more modern alternative (like VLC), or are there going to be some side effects (error pop-ups, missing buttons in Windows Explorer, etc).

Edited October 15, 2017 by Lex24

[Frano35]

Yes it is, I removed it in Windows XP and Windows 7 and using MPHC+ player

[Lex24]

I have removed WMP and WMP 6.4 but Microsoft Update picks up the following high priority updates from 2011 as missing. They are both for WMP:

KB 2479943
KB 2619339

I'm not sure about the best practices in such a case, whether it's better to ignore or install those updates?

The XP was built from the following packages and then manually updated with a few KB*.exe files for the last few weeks. The system is lean and works perfectly. It's just over 3.3 GB (including 2 GB default pagefile.sys).

XPSP3_QFE_UpdatePack_10-10-17.7z
XPSP3_QFE_POSReady_Addon_20171115_5er.7z
YumeYao_IE8_Addon_Clean_ENU_1.5.35.7z

The following updates were installed manually from Microsoft Update Catalog as they became available after 2017-Nov-15:

KB4049068
KB4051956
KB4052978
KB4052303

For the record, here are the links to the packages mentioned above:

https://ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=7184&sid=20369196b32dc785d016360d976b1c2d

https://ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10479&sid=256a9e5f393205ae0332563b678dfd69

https://ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10482

 

[Destro]

you can remove wmp,  i don't know why you would want to remove the codecs from the computer.  

[Lex24]

I have had another look at Last Session.ini in nLite and it turns out I forgot to remove Media Center component (Components - Multimedia). This could possibly explain why Microsoft Update picks up those two old high priority updates.

Both updates are included in XPSP3_QFE_UpdatePack_10-10-17.7z and if they are missing it most likely means that they were removed by nLite during integration process. In that case it should be ok to simply ignore them.


I use Linux for every day computing and only need Windows to run a few applications (Excel, income tax software, etc). I decided to build a lean XP system geared specifically towards those few selected applications.