HOWTO: Disable wmpnscfg.exe

I am sure you too must be wondering how to disable wmpnscfg.exe from ever starting again, right? You've come to the right place!

Every now and then some program offers some service which isn't needed by everyone, yet it requires having a process running and wasting resources in the background. Furthermore, sometimes such a process listens on a network port which lowers the overall system security. What is worse though, is that there is no way to kill the damn thing and stop it from respawning.

Of course you can always take the ownership, adjust permissions and delete the offending executable, but that is barbaric. Here is how to disable it without having to delete files:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences\HME]
"DisableDiscovery"=dword:00000002

Paste the above snippet into the Notepad and save it as wmpnscfg_disable.reg. Double-click the .reg file, and it won't start again in future.

Now you can also disable Media Sharing from within Windows Media Player, disable Windows Media Player Network Sharing service, and kill the wmpnscfg.exe process.

The registry key solution was provided by James Dooley, Development Lead of Windows Media Devices Group — he also said the following:

As to why it starts running when you've disabled media sharing, that's a bug in WMP 11 Beta2.

Nice to know that it still hasn't been fixed.