I have Vista machine with Windows Media Center, and have had issues with connecting it to my 360 as an extender. I wondered what the issue was for a while, and could never really find any definitive answer. I never had an error in my event log on the windows machine, and the 360's error message was pretty generic. For the most part, I chalked it up to poor network performance (both are wireless on a 802.11g network). But in the back of my mind, I thought something else was up.

Here's what made me wonder: The first time the two are connected, it works just fine. As a matter of fact, it works just fine until the windows machine is taken off the network, connected to another network, and then reconnected to my home network - then the two won't talk anymore. Removing the extender and then immediately re-adding it works, and then I can get the two working again. I don't do too much with Media Center, so it's not a big deal - just a bit of a pain.

I've never really figured out what the issue is, but I did see a few things about extenders not working when the media center is on a domain - which mine is. The solution for those people in that situation? Remove the computer from the domain. Not really a solution!

I think my ultimate solution is going to be to upgrade one of my other machines to have some more RAM, a better video card, a TV tuner, and put Vista on that one. Then I can connect the two permanently - and it's on the wired network, so performance should be better anyway.

Still, it's kind of disappointing that it doesn't work the way it is - especially when it works when first connected, but not after that.