Freezing when overheating with Windows Media Centre

A couple of weeks ago (bank holiday Monday) my laptop suddenly froze. I was busy typing a WordPress post when it happened. The only application that I was using was Google Chrome. It happened a couple of times that day. So the next day, after running Windows memory diagnostics all night and nothing being reported, I took it into some people to have a look. They said it was overheating. It would take a couple of days to strip down and clean out. I said I'd prefer to take the machine home; I wanted to take copies of files rather than attempt to recover from a backup. When I got home I thought I'd perform some additional diagnostics of my own.

1. installed a program called speedfan444.exe 
2. didn't do any configuring - just left it running
3. when the machine locked up it was no longer visible - DOH!
4. so I paid more attention when I'd restarted it.
5. restart temps were showing at 56 to 61 degrees C
6. when it appeared to lock up the CPUs were running at approx 70% -temps were higher
7. I could see some fluctuations and realised I was just about able to do things
8. So I started Windows Task Manager, and viewed processes from all users
9. and found wmpnetwk.exe to be using 50% CPU
10. I had to kill it - service stop didn't work
11. then I disabled the service
12. restarted
13. temperatures and CPU have been much lower since.

So why did this problem appear now? Well I'd only just played with Windows Media Centre (WMC) a couple of days before. I was trying to do something with one of my customer's radio interviews; convert from wma to mp3. I thought WMC might do the trick. It didn't, but I did find an Aussie prog to do the job.

Anyway, it appears that WMPNetwk.exe was now resident in my machine and it was trying to do a lot of stuff. It may have been attempting to find details about the n thousand files it had wanted to add to its library. 

I'm not going to give it another chance.