IOth,
THANK YOU for taking the time to post and confirm this behavior. I've been tearing my hair out looking into this thinking that it was unique to my system, so it's a big help to know that I'm not the only one experiencing this -- not just the crashes, but the album art issue as well. I never tried Media Server before, so I don't know about earlier versions working okay.
Just to add to this, there "may" be a pattern to how long it takes Media Server to crash on my systems. When I select "all" in the genre window (or at least a genre with a very large group of songs) the crashes seem to occur more rapidly. If, on the other hand, I simply pick a single album, I can play the songs for a much longer time before the Media Server crash. This is by no means scientific -- it just "feels" like a pattern at this point in my experimenting. There also "seems" like there might be a link between trying to access the album art and quicker crashes.
If you could, try playing different size groups of files (i.e. bringing up "all" genres and playing a few songs in the list) and see if you find any relation to large groups of songs that end up in "playing now" and more frequent Media Server crashes.
By the way, are you using W2K or XP?
Can anyone confirm that using the latest versions of MC (289, 290, or 291) does NOT cause Media Server crashes at some point when playing songs from the client? Also, can anyone confirm that they ARE seeing album art from the client when looking at the "track info" page of the "playing now" window? I'm wondering if there just aren't that many people playing songs via Media Server, making it take a while for these problems to be confirmed by more people.
JimH -- thanks for looking into this. Please let me/us know if you have any other questions that might help you guys find and answer to this issue.
Thanks again,
Larry