If Your Zune Software Crashes

My Zune software had worked fine for several weeks until I moved my hard drive into another computer. At that point I started getting an error upon startup.

I looked at Microsoft’s solution which was very long, confusing, and led me to a web page with a dimmed out button and no explanation what to do to reset the DRM if the button on that page was dimmed out!

Well, I’ve found many people don’t even need to go through all of that. To make a long story short, the most common fix for this problem is the following:

1. Open up the Documents and Settings folder on the drive in which Windows is installed. Then open the “All Users” folder.
2. Enable viewing of hidden and system folders. Do this by selection Tools and then Folder Options. Click the View tab. Select “Show hidden files and folders” and UN-check “Hide Protected Operating System files” and then OK out until you’re looking at your folder again.
3. You should now see a “DRM” folder. Rename that folder to any other name. I renamed it “DRM_BAK”

That’s it. In most cases, that will fix the problem.

If Windows did not let you rename the folder, try restarting (I had to do this). If that doesn’t work, make sure you’re on the Administrator user account.

Now for the long version, for those of you who are interested, or need more choices…

First, I read that I should try to reset the DRM on my computer. You are supposed to enable viewing of hidden folders first (see above). Then you go into the documents and settings folder, then the “All Users” folder. There will be a “DRM” folder in there that you should rename. The idea is that your software will see that there is no DRM and recreate the folder. I did that on my C drive, but it didn’t work.

I scoured the net and several people said to basically go onto WindowsUpdate and update EVERYTHING. I did that, and nothing worked.

Here are the things that didn’t work

• Uninstalled, then re-installed Zune software
• Updated .NET 2.0
• Updated to IE 7.0
• Updated to Win XP SP3
• Did the Cumulative Security Update for IE 7
• Installed .NET framework 1.1 (AFTER installing 2.0 it was still there in Windows Update, so I installed it.)
• Installed .NET framework 1.1 SP 1
• Installed Security Update for .NET framework 1.1 SP 1
• Installed Root Certificates Update (Didn’t think it would work, but tried…)
• I had “AllUsers” and also “All Users.WINXP” folders, and renamed both DRM subfolders to DRMBak. Did not work.
• Installed Windows Media Player 11. I received two errors after installation was complete. One was a DRM.exe error and then a “Dr Watson postmortem” error.

It wasn’t until I received an error that my F drive was running low on space that I realized the problem.

That computer had multiple hard drives, and there were remnants of old Windows installations on there. I had gone into the C drive’s Documents and Settings folder, but it turns out that was not where my current Windows installation was. It was on the F drive. I only realized that when I saw the low disk space notification as a result of all of the other updates I did.

So I then went into the F drive’s Documents and Settings/All Users folder, renamed the DRM folder to DRM_BAK… and it worked.

Lesson learned: Make sure you are in the CORRECT “Documents and Settings” folder on the correct hard drive!

Some people have said that updating the .NET framework might fix the problem, but it seems that renaming the proper DRM folder usually does the trick.