Vista - Screensaver Causes Paused Movie to Play and Missing Cursor in Media Center

As the title says, when I pause a movie and my screensaver comes on in Media Center the movie starts playing. How can I keep the movie from playing?

Additionally, the mouse cursor disappears in Media Center, from start to finish. I know it's there because moving it around different things get highlighted, etc. Anyone have any idea of how to see the cursor?

Finally, when a movie is paused, whether through Media Center or simply Windows Media Player, the computer won't sleep. I've already chosen the "Allow Computer to Sleep" through the advanced Power Config settings, but to no avail. When there is no movie paused or playing, the computer sleeps fine.

Ideally, when I pause a movie in WMP or Media Center, I'd like the computer to go to screensaver, then shut off display and hard drive then sleep after their respective trigger times have come. The final sleep state does not activate, however, while the first 2 steps occur correctly.

I've searched for solutions to the above to no success. Hopefully someone has an idea to figure this out.

Thanks in advance.

Don't use a screensaver (ie use the None option)

This Sux!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why the heck is this a problem now.

Blood gates & his cronies did not do the end to end testing before they put this patch in a production environment.

Is this a laptop?

And before you go blaming Old Billy, note this - I have none of the problems you are experiencing.

So it is not the OS - just your install.

I don't know Johnny this is happening to too many people to just be an "install" issue. I ain't blaming billy cause it's easy I am blaming him cause his stuff doesn't work the way it should. WMP11 has the option to not allow the windows Vista screensaver to interupt playback of media files, but this option does not work.
So either the Windows Vista screensaver isn't functioning the way it should or the Windows media player isn't. Either way it both windows, hence the gripe with billy
And no this isn't a laptop.

Oh, so your machine has all Windows stuff on it, nothing like...

Drivers, 3rd party software, 3rd party services, anything at all....

yeah - keep blaming the OS and the Windows products - but the fact is if it was a Windows problem it would be *across the board*.

It doesn't happen to me. It doesn't happen the the OP in WiMP - only in that JetAudio he was using.

BTW, have you read through the folliwing tutorial here on our site? Power Options and Sleep Mode Problems

You raise a good point John with regards to other software sitting ontop of my current OS, and I do note that this problem was not an issue a month ago. Since I have had Vista now for several months it cannot be the "out of the box" OS, so I did a check to find out what has been installed over the past month and the only thing has been windows updates for Vista or my 2003 version of Office, once again only Windows .... ... and in the immortal words of Sherlock Homes “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
I still think it's Billy fault, but I am willing to be proven wrong, if somebody can tell me .. why? why? why? this is happening.

Interim solution for myself: I have disabledthe screensaver.

And & yes the Power Options and Sleep Mode Problems tutorial is brilliant. It would have been great if I knew about that site before I had to find out the hard way. I managed to work my way around it when I finally found out why my computer was intermittently turning off.

Again, no offense, but if you installed something 3 months ago, but only called into play a certain aspect of that program 1 month ago, which then started buggering your system, it would certainly *look* like it was Vista 's fault as you hadn't installed anything new in 1 month - but in point of fact it was something that you did in another application that you had never done before that in fact caused the problem, only at the time it didn't throw up any warnings or alert you to any changes being made.

As you yourself said, it was not a problem OOB, so something in the interim caused the problem.

Now, a good place to start to eliminate problems would be hardware diagnostics as well as running to see if there is any critical file corruption going on here.

Thanks for the tip John.
I'll try and let you know