I have successfully been using my XBox 360 as a media center extender for
some time now. For some reason however I am unable to play back music from my
PC within the XBox dashboard - I have to go to media center to do it.

When I try to play music in the dashboard I get the message "Can't connect.
Make sure you have activated this console on your computer."

I am running Vista with a Onecare firewall. I have tried opening ports and
disabling the firewall altogether but this does not seem to make a difference.

Can anyone help?

I had the same problem streaming xvid files stored on my PC to my 360. I
could view them in Media Centre on the 360 but when I went through the
dashboard to play them, I received the same message you did.

The problem was that I hadn't enabled the 360 in media sharing (through
windows media player). I've now done this and it works perfectly.

Here's a link

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Win...a05941033.mspx

Hope that helps.

Andy Jordan