Tuesday, February 26, 2008

An error is preventing this Slide Show from playing - solution

For some reason the screen saver Photos in Windows Vista stopped working.

I think this is related to Nvidia's driver because it started after upgrading but I have not able to confirm this because when I installed the old driver the problem persisted.

It says "an error is preventing this slideshow from playing"

Screen Saver Settings

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/944221 didn't help.

I have tried the tip to delete any of these files to no avail.

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Pictures.pd4

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Photo Gallery\Pictures.pd4

This can come up in Windows Photo Gallery and sometimes it just helps to manually browse through all images and then try the slide show again.
"An error is preventing this Slide Show from playing."

The solution for the slide show was for me to prevent Windows Photo Gallery from using hardware to accelerate image rendering by setting ForceSoftwareRender to 1 on the following registry location or you can save the two rows below to a .reg file using Notepad and then Run (Merge) it.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Viewer]
"ForceSoftwareRender"    = dword:00000001

To activate hardware  set the value to 0.

24 comments:

  1. Restored comments

    Anonymous said...

    Hi,

    I've had this error pop up for the first time after installing Service Pack 1 (SP1).

    The above registry change did not fix it.

    It's a terrible error, because the screen saver will work for me to start with, and then subsequent runnings will give this error and it will not go away.
    March 11, 2008

    Anonymous said...

    I just installed SP1 and also now receive the exact same error when attempting to run a Slide Show. Pls Help!
    April 20, 2008

    Anonymous said...

    I just installed SP1 and now receive the exact same error when trying run a SlideShow. Pls help!
    April 20, 2008

    JTB World said...

    Unfortunately I don't know how to fix this unless the registry hack works.
    Do you have a Nvidia graphic card?
    April 21, 2008

    Lama said...

    Click on start >> right click on the "pictures" folder >> properties >> uncheck Read Only, click apply and OK, check if it works.
    May 24, 2008

    Lama said...

    On the Pictures folder make sure that no shortcut files, movies, music or other files are present. Please Make sure that only the picture files are present, remove all other file format (shortcut files, movies, music or other files) if present.
    May 24, 2008

    Anonymous said...

    I Found A Fix for "an error is preventing this slide show from playing" error in Vista. When you go into Personalization, open screen saver, select Photo. Then go down and click on "Change power settings..." Change to either Balanced or High Performance. You may also need to change jpeg image file size to around 500Kb per image. (I image there is a max size for the folder that you are using for you images, though I am uncertain what it might me). The power change worked for me and my photo screen saver is now working wonderfully.
    Hope this works for all of you.
    Kara
    May 26, 2008

    Anonymous said...

    Thanks I changed my power setting to High Power and my photo screen saver started working again. Will this change any of y computers performance?
    May 31, 2008

    JTB World said...

    >Will this change any of y computers performance?
    As default high performance if something might increase the performance.
    June 01, 2008

    Eddie said...

    The problem in my case was an invalid "shortcut" (or "link") to a non-existing folder. The bad link was deep in a sub tree of the folder I wanted to show pictures from. After I deleted it, the slide show worked fine!
    July 29, 2008

    ReplyDelete
  2. Changing the power setting helped me fix this problem. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Perfect, power settings did the trick!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Changed power setting to balanced and it did the trick! Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unfortunately the power setting change didn't work for me :(. Been trying to fix this for sometime now with no luck. Thanks anyway.

    Ron

    ReplyDelete
  6. I followed the Fix as follows and it worked fine. My laptop is an Acer and O.S is vista.

    ("an error is preventing this slide show from playing" error in Vista. When you go into Personalization, open screen saver, select Photo. Then go down and click on "Change power settings..." Change to either Balanced or High Performance.)

    The power change worked for me and my photo screen saver is now working wonderfully. Thanks are given whoever provided this fix. Hope you can fix the same problem the same way. Good luck.
    Louisa

    ReplyDelete
  7. In my case I found the Pictures directory had been moved to the Music folder (incredibly easy to do by accident in Vista). The shortcuts all followed; however, the path in the screen saver did not. Once I found where the Pictures directory had been moved, I moved it back and screen saver now works again.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I changed my power settings as suggested to high performance, which is fine because my battery failed anyway and isn't covered by the warranty, but that is another matter.

    Anyway my slide show works again, so thanks for the tip!

    ReplyDelete
  9. If the power setting fix doesn't work, try setting the screen saver to just a simple folder with just one picture in it. If this works, then there are some shortcut files (most likely) or some other files that it can't recognise in the pictures directory. Check through each folder and find the problem files. For me it was a shortcut file reffering to another picture folder. Good luck.

    ReplyDelete
  10. This worked for me.
    It could be the slide show index is corrupted. The slide show has its own
    tiny database and it seems to get corrupted occasionally. Fortunately it is
    easy to delete and then slideshow resets to default values.

    Instead of deleting you should be able to rename it and get the same effect
    if you are worried. I have deleted mine several times without any problems,
    but i don't guarantee anything ;-)

    the file is C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo
    Gallery\Pictures.pd4

    Hope that helps!

    ReplyDelete
  11. A lot of good advice in this BLOG, and thanks to all for taking the time to submit them. I tried all of the solutions above, but none of them worked for me.

    However, I do have an NVIDIA card in my laptop, so I suspected the observations about NVIDIA had some merit. So I opened up the NVIDIA Control Panel (via Windows Control Panel), started messing around with the configuration and POOF, the Photo screen saver started working! Sorry to say I can't tell you exactly what I did, but I suspect changing ANY settings in NVIDIA Control Panel will reset the problem. In fact, I had some other display problems that all went away, just by fiddling a little in NVIDIA. If all the other solutions above don't work, give this one a try.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Ben's comment worked for me..
    there are some shortcut files (most likely) or some other files that it can't recognise in the pictures directory. Check through each folder and find the problem files. For me it was a shortcut file reffering to another picture folder. Good luck.

    so I just deleted the shortcut, which for me was to sample pictures (who cares).
    Thanks Ben, works beautifully!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hi everyone,

    I have tried all these solutions and I am now at the end of my thether on this. Microsoft blame the makers of my laptop (Acer) and they in turn blame Microsoft.

    I am using Windows Vista Home Premium and anytime I uninstall anything I start to get this error. The only way that I can get this error to go away is to restore the whole operating system. That is a ridiculous state of affairs and there has to be something that can sort this out.

    Can anyone offer anything else that might help out?

    ReplyDelete
  14. AnonymousJuly 19, 2009

    I just had the sam problem on my screen saver "An error is preventing this slide show from playing" I went back to all my pictures and started looking, and ther it was some other folder in ther that wasent all pictures, I removed it, and that fixed it, THANKS.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I also see the comment "An error is preventing this Slide Show from playing" when I try to use the screen saver for the C: drive. When I go to the photo file on my external hard drive, and use that folder for the screen saver, it works. No error message occurs. Any explanations?

    ReplyDelete
  16. After buying an HP Pocket Media Drive and installing it in the Proprietary slot in the computer an error message showed up saying "an error is preventing this slide show from playing.
    I tried the FIX that Lama and Eddie noted and went into the Pictures folder and deleted a couple shortcuts that HP had provided on the computer. i.e. one was to sample pictures.
    Not sure of the correlation between the Pocket Media Drive and the slideshow but the slideshow works fine now. Note: The slide show worked fine every time I took the Pocket Media drive out before I deleted the shortcuts.
    CJR

    ReplyDelete
  17. AnonymousJuly 27, 2010

    Wish someone would answer this blog with a viable solution!

    ReplyDelete
  18. Changing the power settings didn't work, neither did moving the files into another folder. Look through all your pictures and see if you can find any movies or music-- once I removed those, the screensaver worked fine.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Nope, I've tried all the solutions:
    - I don't use Realtek, mine is a Conexant device on a Toshiba Laptop.
    - It was running perfectly fine until I added four photos to the folder. Removal of all photos did not help.
    - I'm unable to find "AppData" under Users. Any direction here?
    - There are only photographs, all under 5Mb in the folder.
    - The folder is on m desktop, and, as noted above, worked fine until today.
    - I have changed my power settings, although it was already in the 'correct' position, to no avail.

    I'm just about to frisbee this laptop out the door. Can anyone please help me?

    ReplyDelete
  20. "I'm unable to find "AppData" under Users. Any direction here?"

    Try %AppData% or %LOCALAPPDATA%. You can access the path by pasting the variable in Windows Explorer address field or use Run from Windows Start.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Ok,

    So I deleted the database file. After that, it worked... for about a week.

    Now its got the same error again, and the database file is not present (as I had already deleted it and the slideshow worked after I had done that).

    I'm still out of ideas for my Toshiba. Help please?

    ReplyDelete
  22. AnonymousMay 25, 2011

    Indeed this is a graphic card issue. Just go in the control pannel and set the Globale Settings
    to apllication controled and power pref at max. It works for me. Thus, new nvidia cards suck a lot of power, if it does not work last resort might be to get a min of 600w power supply. Voila good luck ....

    ReplyDelete
  23. I have "Windows 8" and I was having the same "error problem". I found the cause. "Microsoft Silverlight". I uninstalled it using "IObit Uninstaller" to make sure that it did not leave any "remnants" behind and now it works perfectly!

    ReplyDelete
  24. I use a NAS Drive for Screen Savers over wireless. I had to add this key to get it to work. Procmon was looking for this key. This is Win7
    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    The value I added was 10000
    Which is 10seconds.
    It fixed mine.

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Photo Viewer\Viewer]
    "MaxNetworkTimeoutMilliseconds"=dword:00001388

    ReplyDelete