Vista MC: No Tuners No playback in Media Center

I have a vista premium machine I use primarily as a PVR.  I had a stable system but decided to upgrade the CPU from a celeron D to a core2duo.  after performing the upgrade, I found that I am unable to do anything in media center related to tuning or recording OR playing back the videos.  As soon as the machine starts the ehRecvr service fails, and then any other attempt to playback media using media center or media player fails as well.  when shutting down the system to install the CPU, there was a MCE update that was installed at the same time.  uninstalling and reinstalling the update didn’t fix anything,.

Windows messages that popped up.
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service stepped working and has closed.
Digital Cable Device registration Application. stopped working and was closed.
there has been another one about e-someting failing as well.

trying to play recorded video gives me the error
Video Error:
Files needed to display video are not installed or not working correctly.  Please restart Windows Media Center or restart the computer.

trying to play the recorded shows in WMP crashes windows media player. 

Trying to play the videos in VLC is fine.

trying to add a tuner (apparently VMC thinks no tuners are installed)
Tuner not Found.
the tv signal cannot be configured because no tuner hardware was detected.  please insure that your hardware is correctly installed.  If you do not have tuner hardware, you may purchase a tuner online from Windows Marketplace…
also, it took a long time for it to get this error message, something like 2 minutes.

The HDhomerun GUI app can tune in channels and play them through VLC with no problem.

Some events from the Event Viewer that are probably related.

Faulting application ehRecvr.exe, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549b54f, faulting module Indiv01.key, version 11.0.6000.7000, time stamp 0x46df729b, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x000acb08, process id 0xbac, application start time 0x01c82a6d0a81261a.

Faulting application ehPrivJob.exe, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549b489, faulting module Indiv01.key, version 11.0.6000.7000, time stamp 0x46df729b, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x000abd63, process id 0x810, application start time 0x01c82a6d0a8d11aa.

It seems like I have hosed something in my system.  I dont think its the CPU, but maybe it is (CPU was used in my workstation machine for several months under very intensive operations, never any issues) so if it’s software, where do I start?  I really dont want to try and reinstall the OS if I can help it…  Any ideas?

Thanks