Can't end Media Player process

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support (More info?)

Hi All: XP sp2, although it's happened occasionally with previous
versions of XP as well. Hardware is a PIII600 with 1-gig of RAM.

On occasion I'll be playing a large >100-meg AVI file with WMP9
(latest version), and it will hang...that is, I'll lose audio and
video, but the player will continue to play, with the progress-slider
continuing to progress.

At any point in time after this happens, I will be able to close WMP,
but if I look in Task Manager the process is still active, and I'm
unable to end it. Even if the progress bar reaches the end and stops,
and I close WMP, the process doesn't end. Neither "End Process" nor
"End Process Tree" has any effect.

At the same time, certain other processes that are active at the same
time will hang if I try to end them, especially Visual Interdev,
Access or I think any other Office XP components. I did not launch WMP
from within any of these applications, like invoking it from Internet
Explorer or anything.

The problem seems to be related to virtual memory, because it only
happens after working with a lot of large temp files (like downloading
a lot of stuff, copying things between hard drives, and then deleting
them).

I have two 9-gig SCSI drives, with the paging file on the boot drive
and the media files on the second drive. The boot drive is somewhat
full, but I rarely get alerts that the paging file is running out of
memory. Even if I delete a lot of stuff and free up several gig on the
boot drive, the problem recurs. I've had the problem occur with other
drive configurations as well on the same box (originally I had a
single 40-gig ATA100 drive connected to a Promise controller chip on
the motherboard, and I swapped in the SCSI drives hoping to get around
this problem).

That's a lot of background just to ask the question: why can't I end
WMP process?