Windows media player just stops working

[Aegaeonos]

recently at any given time windows media player will not play a video i would like it to play and when i try to exit windows media player it just stays on even when i try to terminate the application with ctrl-alt-delte. This problem sometime cause other programs on my comp to just feeze up. Over time (great amount of time) it would eventually close itself and everything would be fine again or I would have to restart windows manually ( switch). Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[fattony]

installed any codec / codec packs recently?
what version of windows and wmp?
are you all up to date with windows updates?
is it certain file types that cause it to hang?