[Rhys23710]

Hi, I hope that you may be able to provide a suggestion as to why my ServerWMC has stopped working.  I have had ServerWMC working very well with a Windows7 version of MCE for over a year. This connects to a remote Raspberry PI running LibreELEC.
The other day the LibreElec reports that it cannot connect to ServerWMC, though connectivity exists, as I can navigate via "Video" > Files to the Windows MCE recorded TV folder and play content.
When I looked at the MCE it has a ServerWMC error message : "Unable to open a listening socket on port 9080, check your firewall settings or if this port is already in use. Restart the server after setting a new port number."
If I OK's this dialogue box then ServerWMC did not load, I could not access any of the configuration menu.  
I have subsequently tried the following but still cannot get ServerWMC to run, it always get to the same error message :
    1. Inspected the port allocation in Windows and this port is not listed as in use.
    2. Turned of the firewall completely
    3. Uninstall and reinstall ServerWMC
    4. Another post mentioned a corrupt ServerWMC config file, so I also deleted the original config.xml file and contents of that folder. After reinstalling ServerWMC, I still get the same error and also note that no new config.xml has been created.

The latest ServerWMC.log is here https://pastebin.com/i8KmcGeP

I would appreciate any thoughts of what else I could try, I am unaware of any changes I have made to the main windows machine since it stopped working.

Thanks

[krustyreturns]

Sometimes anti-virus shuts down this socket communication. Check that.

[Rhys23710]

Thanks for the suggestion. 
I am not running any 3rd party AV software on this box.  I just tried shutting down Windows Defender, which was on, but it makes no difference. I still get the same error message and no ServerWMC interface.

[krustyreturns]

Looking at the log file this time (yeah, sorry), I see what you are saying.  Serverwmc gets an error immediately saying it can't get the configuration, reading the config file seems to be a total fail.  When this happens its supposed to create a default config file, but according to your post that doesn't happen either.  So I think its safe to assume then you don't have a socket problem, the problem is the config is hosed somehow.  There are a bunch of errors getting the config data which uses an xml reader library in .net.  One possibility is .net got hosed and needs to be reinstalled, but I have never heard of this happening before, but you know, why not.  I also recall sometime in the distance past a user reporting an error like this and it had to do with permissions, somehow swmc couldn't write to the folder where it stores the config data.  I think it had to do with the first time they installed swmc they did it as admin and the next time they didn't.  Did you blow away the entire serverwmc folder where config file is created?  If so, did swmc recreate this folder when it was installed?

[Rhys23710]

Thanks for the pointers, that has managed to fix it, though I am not quite sure which was the actual fix !  The machine is dedicated to being a PVR using win WMC and only has an Admin account so any installs would have been with that.  So this is what I did  :

1. I downloaded and ran the Microsoft .net repair tool, which only suggested starting / stopping a couple of services.
2. I was then going to uninstall .NET 4.7.1 (from Uninstall panel ) but saw there was a "repair to original setup" option, so I took this, which appeared to re install .NET
3. I Uninstalled ServerWMC
4. Removed VDSoftware folder
5. Rebooted the machine
6. Re installed the ServerWMC software but from a file on the C drive, the install file was previously on a D drive (not sure this would make any difference)

It sounds from your description that it might have been the .NET issue. Thanks again for your help.

[krustyreturns]

Good, thanks for letting me know.