How Do I Stop My Playlists from Constantly Refreshing ?

 Wojo Mulva wrote:

I have the identical problem.  Playlists are impossible to edit.  My music is stored on a usb hard-drive- perhaps this is the cause?

I was having the same problem.  I do use an external hard drive which stores all music.  It also contains the playlists, about 23 in all.  I was able to stop the refreshing, although I still have yet to find the underlying cause and I will have to rebuild some playlists.  Here's what I've done so far...

Symptoms:

1. Playlists refreshed about every 10 seconds;
2. After some refreshes, it would show duplicate songs in a repeating pattern (song 1, song 2, song 1, song 2, song 3, song 4, song 3, song 4...);
3. On long playlists, if I scrolled down through it, the numbering would change (many times all song numbers would turn to "0") and beside each song would appear a yellow exclamation point;
4. Often if I scrolled through a playlist, if it refreshed, it would automatically redirect me back to the top of the playlist;
5. The constant refreshing resulted in continuous hard drive access, wasting system resources

Partial solution:

1. I clicked on each playlist and watched it for about 10 seconds to see if it would refresh.  I noticed that not every one of my 23 playlists were refreshing. 
2. I created a temporary folder on my desktop (my Zune is not configured to access my desktop for media files)
3. I wrote down the name of each playlist that did refresh, made a copy (from the source on my external drive), and put the copy in the temp folder on my desktop
4. Once I made copies of the playlists that were refreshing (5 in all), I deleted them from Zune (and subsequently from my external drive)

Immediately this stopped the constant refreshing for the remaining 18 playlists and also the constant external drive access, which freed up my system resources.  Just to test, I took one of the "problem" playlists from my temp folder and added it back to the original source folder so the Zune software could recognize it and the refreshing started again.  I plan to go through one of the smaller playlists in the temp folder and create a brand new one with the same songs to see if it is a particular file or if it was just the playlist file itself that was causing the refresh problem. 

Also, I could not find any commonalities between the "problem" playlists or distince differences between them and the remaining 18.   I will say however that this overall problem did not start happening until I upgraded to the latest version of the Zune software.

Again, not the ideal solution since I haven't yet found the underlying problem, but at least it stopped the annoying refreshing!  I'll post any new developments if I find the actual source of the problem.   

UPDATE--FOUND THE CAUSE:

I figured out it was the Windows Media Playlist files (.wpl) files associated with each of the Zune playlists files (.zpl) that were causing the refresh problem.  You see, every time I create a Zune playlist file, an identically named Windows Media Playlist file was being created.  I don't even use Windows Media Player so these files are useless to me.  Once I figured out this was the problem, I moved all of my temporarily removed playlists that were previously causing me problems back my Zune playlist folder  (see previously posted info above) and then deleted all of the .wpl files, leaving only the Zune playlist files (.zpl).  This stopped all refreshing problems.  Note: for those of you that use these .wpl files for the Windows Media Player, this would not be the ideal solution. 

The only remaining problem is that every time I create a new playlist, I have to go into my zune playlist folder and delete the corresponding .wpl file--more of a nuisance than anything else.  Now I just need to figure out if I can "turn off" the auto-creation of these .wpl files altogether...