Thanks Marcus to share his way to fix this. Some people after upgrade to windows 8.1 find that can not scan in Windows Media Center.
Here is the detail steps provide by Marcus .
If you have the problem maybe you can have a try:
Basically what I did was to just delete the WMC channel database and reboot. This appears to fix the problem, you can then scan for channels and do not seem to hit the crashing issue. My conclusion is that something in the channel database from 8.0 does not work with other windows functions after the 8.1 upgrade. As my license is for 8.0 with a free upgrade I am forced into the situation, as a clean install at 8.1 would probably work but is forbidden with my keys.
Anyway to be precise what I did was:
1) Stopped WMC services (thinking that they may be accessing the channel database file).
2) Then navigate to %programData%/Microsoft/eHome (note this directory is hidden) typing that string in the address bar will take you there
3) Then delete the database file (in my case mcepg9-0)
4) Then reboot, this then starts the services again in a clean way
After this you will have to go through the whole set-up palava again. But crucially in my case the ability to scan for channels worked!
Thanks
Kind Regards
steven