Unable to kill VLC audio, even with reboot

[Bookstein]

Hi,
I am running VideoLAN VLC 0.8.6b on Windows Home XP

Upon shutting down the computer and then restarting it, VLC continued to play a live audio stream, even though VLC did not appear to be running. I found nothing obvious in the task manager that was a VLC program. I even uninstalled VLC and rebooted and the stream continues to play. Then I reinstalled VLC and rebooted and the stream continued. Running VLC or any other audio program does not interrupt the stream, just superimposes on it.

How do I kill this thing?

regards,
nb

[DJ]

The only thing I can even remotely think of is that you have installed VLC as a service. If the service was active at the time of the uninstall all the modules necessary (in use) would NOT have been uninstalled.

[anexny]

So, if VLC doesn't appear in the task manager, and was uninstalled... are you SURE it's VLC?

Here's my guess: You have a TV tuner card, or something similar, which delivers audio via your sound card's line-in jack. Maybe VLC setup the mixer to enable line-in playback. Go into the mixer and mute things one-by-one.

If you're still having the issue after this, try going into task manager and sorting by CPU usage. Surely anything that's decoding an audio stream will take up a few % of your CPU's cycles, so see what floats to the top.

[Bookstein]

Thanks for the well thought out suggestions. I wish that the plumbing of Windows had been that well thought out.

Well, no tuner card, problem clearly started with VLC, standard dumb-user installation i.e., no deliberate services installation. CPU usage in task manager did not reveal undue decoding behaviour, but

Problem persisted for about 24 hours after reboots, reinstalls of VLC etc on a (I think .ram data feed) but miraculously this morning (without another reboot) the problem is no longer evident

go figure.

thanks again,
-nb