WMP11 corrupted, then all my music duplicated on my phone

For a while I have been syncing my phone with Windows Media Player on my PC

One day the PC gave a message “Windows Media Player Database Corrupted” …. ”the library database is corrupted” and something along the lines of … don’t worry, it will re-build itself.  Sure enough I didn’t have a problem with WMP on the PC, but …

Next time I connected my phone to the PC, ActiveSync came up with a message that, for Media sync, setup needed to be completed. I proceeded with the setup.

The Sync then went ahead – but it copied all my music to my phone again – so that every song was duplicated on the phone! (My phone has a 16GB storage card but I have about 9GB of music – so this was a problem!). When I used WMP on the phone it listed every track twice. When I used File Explorer on the phone this also listed every track twice.

Solution
1. In WMP I ended the sync partnership with the storage card (see separate post below)
2. I then deleted all the music on the storage card
- I connected the phone to the PC and ignored the request to setup media sync
- In ActiveSync clicked on Explore -> My Windows Based Mobile Device -> Storage Card -> Music -> deleted all the sub-folders
- however, although the tracks had been deleted from the storage card, WMP on the phone was still listing them all (and if I asked it to play one it unsurprisingly crashed). So…
3. In ActiveSync clicked on Explore -> My Windows Based Mobile Device -> Storage Card -> deleted file WMPInfo (I first did copied it to my PC just in case) BUT the music was still listed in WMP so …
Also in folder \Storage Card\MSMETADATA deleted the file XMEMediaLibrary.mlb (took a backup too)
Now the tracks don’t show in WMP on the phone
4. Now I was ready to follow the prompt in ActiveSync to complete setup for Media and all should be ok
HOWEVER I was inspired to set-up Media sync a different way by this very helpful web page
http://www.pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=reviews&id=1004
How did I setup sync to WMP? See seperate post: “Setting-up Sync of WMP to Phone”

My setup
Windows Media Player 11 running on an XP PC
Palm Treo Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
Palm connects to PC using ActiveSync4.5