Fix NS_E_URLLIST_INVALIDFORMAT (0XC00D106D) in Windows Media Player

You opened a playlist in Windows Media Player, and instead of your music, you got NS_E_URLLIST_INVALIDFORMAT (0XC00D106D) — "Windows Media Player cannot play the playlist because it is not valid." This isn't your media files being broken. The playlist file itself — usually a .wpl or .asx — has a formatting error Windows Media Player can't parse.

What's actually happening here is that WMP expects a specific XML structure inside playlist files. If that structure is mangled — by a crash during save, a corrupted hard drive sector, or a third-party app that wrote garbage — WMP chokes immediately. The error code, 0xC00D106D, maps to NS_E_URLLIST_INVALIDFORMAT, which literally means "the URL list in the playlist has an invalid format." But don't overthink it: in practice, it's almost always the whole file being bad.

Here's the fix flow. Start with the simplest thing, and only move down if it's still broken.

30-second fix: rebuild the playlist from scratch

This works 80% of the time. The corrupted file can't be repaired, but you can rebuild it fast.

1. Open Windows Media Player.
2. Go to the Library tab (should be your default view).
3. In the left pane, find the playlist that throws the error. Right-click it and select Delete. Choose "Delete from library only" — this keeps the actual media files on disk.
4. Now rebuild: drag the same songs or videos from your library back into the Create Playlist pane on the left. Name it exactly what it was before.
5. Try playing it.

The reason step 3 works is that you're telling WMP to forget the broken file reference and create a fresh one from the metadata it already has in its database. You're not re-encoding anything — just building a new pointer list.

5-minute fix: repair the playlist file manually

If the quick rebuild didn't work, the error is likely in a playlist file you imported from somewhere — a USB drive, email attachment, or download. The file itself is corrupt.

1. Locate the playlist file on your system. Common paths: C:\Users\[YourName]\Music\Playlists or %USERPROFILE%\Music\Playlists. If you imported it, check your Downloads folder.
2. Right-click the file and open it in Notepad (or any text editor).
3. Look at the content. A valid .wpl file starts with and has a root element. If you see raw binary characters, HTML tags, or the file is 0 bytes — it's dead.
4. If it looks like XML but has obvious typos (missing quotes, unclosed tags like without />), you can fix them. For example, should be or .
5. Save the file, reopen WMP, and try playing it again.

If the file is completely garbled, skip the manual edit. Just delete that file from your disk and re-import from a backup or source.

15-minute fix: reset the Windows Media Player library database

This is for the rare case where WMP's internal database itself is corrupted. This happened to me twice after a Windows update borked the database schema. The playlist files on disk are fine, but WMP can't read them because its index is scrambled.

1. Close Windows Media Player completely.
2. Press Win + R, type services.msc, and press Enter.
3. Find Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service. Right-click it and select Stop. (If it's not running, that's fine.)
4. Now navigate to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Media Player. This is C:\Users\[YourName]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player.
5. Delete everything in that folder. Yes, every file. Windows will recreate it when you launch WMP.
6. Restart Windows Media Player. It will rebuild the library from scratch — this can take a few minutes if you have a huge collection.
7. Re-import your playlists or rebuild them from the Library pane.

A word of caution: deleting that folder will also wipe your play counts, ratings, and recently added timestamps. It's a nuclear option. Only do it if the first two steps failed and you're sure the error isn't from an individual corrupt file.

What if none of these work?

If the error persists, the problem isn't WMP — it's the actual media file references. One of the tracks or videos in that playlist might be missing, renamed, or on a drive that's disconnected (external USB, network share).

In WMP, right-click the problematic playlist and choose Edit in Playlist. Look for track entries with a red X or a grayed-out status. Those are your broken links. Remove them and the playlist will play the rest.

That's it. You don't need third-party playlist repair tools — they usually just re-parse the same broken XML and give you the same error. The solutions above cover every real scenario I've seen in over a decade of supporting Windows Media Player.