Got an Audio or Video Question? I've answered hundreds of them and compiled the most popular questions in a downloadable searchable 200-page collection of answers. From finding the right codecs to play your movies, to converting files to new formats, this guide steps you through solutions to dozens of audio and video problems. Think of this as the ultimate painkiller for your personal digital video and audio headaches. 
Mary queries, "Sometimes when I reboot my computer I get an error message telling me mim.exe is not responding. The computer then gets stuck and doesn't reboot properly. What is mim.exe and how can I fix this?"
mim.exe is part of Musicmatch Jukebox. By default it automatically loads in the background when your computer boots up. Musicmatch currently does not provide a way to turn this off in the application preferences. It's likely the background application is not shutting down properly during your reboot operation, which is why you are seeing the error message. You have a few options to address the problem.
The first thing I recommend is turning off the automatic load on startup option. You can't do this from inside Musicmatch, so you need to do it using MSCONFIG, which is the built-in System Configuration Utility. From your Start menu, click Run and type msconfig. Click the Startup tab and scroll until you find something called mimboot. This is the application used to load mim.exe into your system memory on startup. Uncheck the box next to mimboot, click OK and reboot your system.
If you regularly use Musicmatch, this doesn't entirely solve your problem. When you close Musicmatch, mim.exe remains in memory to help Musicmatch launch quickly the next time you open the application. To make sure it doesn't hang your reboot, you may need to kill mim.exe from the Task Manager Processes tab prior to shutdown, which is a hack but should work. Launch Task Manager using Ctrl+Alt+Del, right-click mim.exe and choose end process before rebooting. The other option is to download SmartClose and create a profile to specifically close mim.exe before rebooting.
If you don't use Musicmatch, I suggest uninstalling it. The music files compatible with Musicmatch are also compatible with every other audio player on the planet, so you really don't need it. If it's causing you problems, eliminate the possibility of your system getting stuck by uninstalling. At the very least, make sure you have the latest version installed in case the version on your system has a bug.
