use winamp for music and vlc for videos. populate playlists on winamp instead of using the library function so it's quicker. and for added speed, keep it at the default (old) skin. VLC doesn't suck for videos. so you still have that covered at least, and i've found that there's better support for the 100,000 different kinds of video files there are on teh internetz. it'll take 5 minutes to download and install them both, but it'll work much better than windows media player. plus if you're using XP, it'll work a HELL of a lot better, since everything windows is making now is almost 100 percent geared toward vista.