I was running into ALL kinds of problems with WMP on Vista (64, but I hear 32 is bad also) where it was not ripping my CDs into MP3s, getting errors when trying to even play my CDs, and generally confusing the hell out of me. It was NOT a codec problem, everything was normal on my system. In fact, it would play about 30 seconds of a song and then throw an error.
But I just upgraded to Windows 7, and now my WMP is working fine!
So now I have Microsoft’s new tagline for their advertisements they are plastering all over hell and back: “Windows 7: You can play music now!”