Feel free to be as lazy as you want, suggesting alternatives to programs that might be causing you problems is pretty effortless.

but you might want to know that the new version of Windows being released later this year will only be $40 for an upgrade... If vista is treating you well, great, but if not upgrading doesn't take too much effort as far as I know

Winamp is another good freeware media player.

^this

PowerDVD is a good one as well, though its expensive as hell.

I have used a version of Winamp years ago and remember somewhat liking it.

As for that new version of Windows being a dirt-cheap upgrade, that's neat! I might look into that at some point soonish.

For me, Winamp do look too fancy. That's I prefer VLC media player.

VLC is nice in that it'll play most things you throw at it without any configuration or plugins or whatever else. It's also free software, of course.

I haven't used it in a long time myself though, preferring Media Player Classic + CCCP on Windows and mplayer on GNU/Linux for videos.

as far as for music playback though, foobar2000 is the best player on Windows, no questions asked. Completely great out-of-the-box, but with tons of plugins and settings to do pretty much anything you could want a music player to do. I believe it also has a low memory footprint? but I've never looked too much into that. Will support most general use formats by default, but you can get a ton of game music plugins and other formats as well.