Missing Movie Maker And My Latest Film

Some time ago I blogged about how Windows XP came with a handy little program to edit movies, Windows Movie Maker. Most conveniently, it comes with Windows XP automagically. It's just there.

Except when it isn't.

Today, I went to record and edit a video, and for the life of me, I couldn't find Windows Movie Maker installed on my Windows XP system. Off to the Microsoft's website I went, to try to download a fresh copy. I was greeted with this winner of a message:

[Page title: Windows Movie Maker 2.1 Download]

Movie Maker 2.1 is available for download with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). You can download SP2, Movie Maker 2.1, and all future critical updates automatically by turning on the Automatic Updates feature in Windows XP.

You can also download SP2 and Movie Maker 2.1 from Microsoft Update. If you cannot use Automatic Updates or download SP2 via Windows Update, order a CD.

Got it. Except I don't want to download SP2 - I already have SP2. Now what the heck do I do? I clicked on all the links provided, and tried to coax Windows Update to give me Movie Maker but had no luck.

This, needless to say, was annoying and useless. Why can't Microsoft make the download for Movie Maker explicitly available? Who knows. Who cares.

I ended up finding two work arounds:

• Download an older version of Windows Movie Maker from Download.com. I did this, and it works just fine.
• Re-install Movie Maker by following these instructions. This one is a bit sketchier. When the dialog box came up asking me to drop in the Windows XP CD, I entered in C:\WINDOWS\i386, that satisfied the install program. This solution is much sketchier, but still seemed to do the trick.

To prove that Movie Maker completely worked, I put together this Short Film (and using the phrase film here is being quite generous). I call it, The Cup. It's an action flick. The music is titled The Cyanide Valentine - Freaks. Enjoy!