What a horrible mess!
I’m trying to setup a VM to share my media with my XBox, so I’ve got Windows Media Center 2005 running smoothly, all updated in VMWare. Then I try to connect the XBox… So far I’ve discovered that:

• Just because you can connect long enough to pair the XBox with Windows doesn’t mean Windows can share with it. I’ve had no luck getting past the initial setup.
• If you want to skip the Media Center Extender, you’ll need upgrade to WMP 11
• Even with that, you can’t share video. You also need to install the crashy Zune software and re-add your media library to it.
• None of the above matters because none of it will work unless you have “Windows Certified” router.

On my Mac I have one app for music (iTunes), one for photos (iPhoto), and a folder for video. Connect360 knows all of them, because the APIs are standard across the platform, so it can share all of them with ONE click after the 30 second install.

Windows is a steaming pile of poo at sharing media…

Update: Some progress — it turns out Media Center Extenders use some derivation of Terminal Services, so if you don’t have that service, plus Fast User Switching, enabled, it will refuse to work (and also refuse to tell you why)

Update 2: Finally got it to browse my videos. Unfortunately, Media Center doesn’t use the same set of codecs as WMP. I’m not prepared to put another n hours into figuring out how to get codec support into Media Center. Screw this Windows crap, I’m going back to my transcoded Mac solution…