***UPDATE*** June 7 2010 ***UPDATE***
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So here's the deal... After many suggested tests and pulling my hair and nearly crying because I was one more curse word away from having to discard my use of both MediaMonkey and my Awesome Creative Zen player, I found the catalyst and solution to my issue! It made me slap my forehead..duhhhh....
So it all started when I took a Microsoft update and after it was finished all of a sudden MediaMonkey would no longer close normally and the process would keep running, as if it was trying to connect to something. I cleared all plug-ins and add-ons from MM and still nothing, I even re-installed it clean and still it wouldn't close. Then I unistalled EVERY MS update I took that day and still nothing. I was then assisted by a kind fellow here on the forum and we ran the debug mode and found that it was the d_WMDM.dll plug-in that was buggering everything up and so we removed that file and now MediaMonkey was able to close down without hanging as a process. YAY! I was excited... but no, because now i was not able to load my Creative ZEN and sych to it?
So now the issue went deeper than MediaMonkey and I scoured the net for 2 weeks to find something or someone with a similar issue, no luck. The issue first was that my Zen was no longer seen by my computer? The device manager was showing it but with the "Yellow" exclamation mark. I was not able to update the driver at all and so I looked for that solution first. I found a site where the notes had suggested resetting all the permissions in XP and so I did that which you can find at the link below...
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/reset ... indows-xp/
I went back into the Device Manager after running the suggested reset program and viola, the drivers updated perfectly!!! I downloaded and updated my ZEN firmware and all seemed good. YAY! I was excited.... but no, because now even though the driver and firmware were updated it still could not be accessed through the "My Computer" location, actually it didn't even show up there. The Zen Media Explorer program wouldn't pick it up, the media device folder in my Control Panel didn't even see it and again, none of the media programs including MediaMonkey would load it???
So I researched some more... I found that people were having issues between using the UMS drivers and the MTP drivers, many of which were resolved to using only the UMS which does nobody who owns a ZEN any good because it only allows the media to be loaded to the SD card which cannot transfer the files into the main library. By the way, the UMS driver was working for me the whole time when I plugged my ZEN in using the SDcard but I would not settle for this. I found a link to download an updated MTP driver file to my computer which you will find the link for below...
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en
I downloaded and installed the MTP porting Kit and restarted my computer and when I plugged my ZEN in it now displayed that it was "Docked" on my player and my Auto Run features popped up! YAY! I was excited AGAIN... but no... I put the d_WMDM.dll file back into the plug-ins file in the MediaMonkey system folder and selected MM from the auto run display and still nothing loaded.
This is where patches of hair were removed from my head whilst tearing up and cursing! I even reinstalled iTunes in the hopes that they had some kind of proprietary driver that might spring things to life, but no, thank god because I despise iTunes and its uselessness.
Again, with the help of peke on the MM forum I ran some test, as you will see explained in the above posts. but nothing seemed to kick it into gear.
So with much disappointment today, I GAVE UP. I was going to live with the fact that I would not be able to synch to my ZEN or buy a new ZEN until I was either ready to completely reformat my computer or buy a new one altogether, neither of which I could afford (time or money) at the very moment. So I resumed life with typical process and I turned Microsoft Updates back on and as expected it was suggesting that i download and install everything I had uninstalled and more, including WMP 11. So what the hell, I went for it. My ZEN was still plugged in charging while the update was going on and all of a sudden the "new device detected" command popped up and told me it was installed and ready to use and then the Auto Run prompt appeared again. I selected MediaMonkey, after putting d_WMDM.dll back into it's appropriate folder, and it immediatly loaded, asked me to configure the device and there it was listed in the left lane process tree in MediaMonkey, ready for files to be loaded. I checked all other places as well like "My Computer" and the control panel "Media Devices" folder and also in the Device Manager, everything looked great! The final test was to see if MediaMonkey would close properly and so i clicked the big red "X" and it closed perfectly. YAY! I was excited and without any disappointment! It was fixed! (This is where I slapped my forehead and started glue the hair back on my head)
So at the end of the day, somehow the WMP 11 I had loaded to my PC originally had become corrupt by an update I had taken. The MTP driver, which for a Windows PC comes as part of WMP, was all buggered up and so when I was trying to close MediaMonkey, the d_WMDM.dll was continuing to run as a process because it could not connect to the MTP drivers and because it could not connect to the MTP driver I wasn't able to load my ZEN either nor would my computer even recognize it. So the slap on the forehead was for the fact that i very well may have solved this just by re-installing WMP 11??? The only thing that makes me think otherwise is that there are many forums out there talking about MTP issues with WMP 11. Either way I was successful, i beat the monster and now I can relax, synch and listen to some tunes by the pool, it's a beautiful day here. Although the wife would like to figure out how to fix the lawnmower now and cut the freakin lawn! Maybe tear the engine apart and re-insatll it?
Thanks to everyone for the help and I hope that maybe one day if this issue arises for anyone else that this resolution will be helpful! CHEERS!