Here's the background. I don't use Windows Media Player or Media Centre, in fact both components have been 'turned off' via the 'Programs and Features' option. My media player of choice is a nightly build of MPC-HC, which plays virtually everything. I do, however, have VLC portable available for those rare instances when MPC-HC can't or won't play something correctly.

This is the situation. I tend to download various media files via torrent, typically, game trailers or freely availably films, such as the recently released, torrent only, Pioneer One. Quite often these files are quite large, being 1GB+ so I quite often like to preview the file after it has downloaded a significant portion of the file. For the most part, this works quite well, and gives me an idea about the worth of continuing the download. Sometimes, however, the file doesn't play as expected and instead plays a completely unrelated file that has been previously played.

Here's the strange thing. if I try to preview the file in MPC-HC or VLC both players play the same, previously played file, regardless of whichever player was originally responsible for playback. Most times, it's not even a file that's been played recently.

I have searched the registry for some sort of MRU cache, but have found nothing. I have made sure each player has had it's respective history/cache deleted and can fine nothing on disk that seems to be storing this, apparently shared data.

So, the question is, where are these unrelated players getting the file information from?

Thnaks.