When using Windows Live Messenger, if you don’t have Windows Media Player installed, and try to tick “Show what I’m listening to”, you will receive a message saying “This feature requires Windows Media Player 9 or later. To install the latest version of Windows Media Player, click Ok”, for those of you like me, who dislike Windows Media Player, will understand why i would not use it, however i am using Windows 7, and Windows Media Player causes havoc with the file associations when setting them for a 3rd party media player, the best way to do it is remove WMP altogether.

Upon removing it, i ran into the problem above, and i know its only an aesthetic feature in WLM, but i like to have it enabled, so i started looking for a way to re enable it, i actually started looking at the Assembly of WLM, but alot of files are loaded, so i couldn’t find the energy to look, but then it dawned on me to use the registry for it, so i did, and i found a solution and wrote a little tool to enable Now Playing.

A download to my tool can be downloaded below, its totally clean, literally compiled it 5 minutes ago.

File: WLM_NowPlaying_Enabler.exe

Size: 211 KB

Download WLM Now Playing Enabler