I suppose WMP 12 was never made available for Vista, was it?

... Also, if that's what you need to do, how's Winamp these days? I haven't used it for years, but I remember the Lite version was still quick and effective. I see it is still available on their website, and only 3.5 MB in size, which is promising!
http://download.nullsoft.com/winamp/client/winamp5621_lite_en-us.exe

In Doug's case, Winamp might just be overkill.

Doug, if that's all you're doing with MP3 files, I'd definitely recommend just installing VLC or Media Player Classic or something lightweight like that. Every time I hear the word RealPlayer I cringe. I'm sure their software is better these days, but I've heard the same thing about the latest Norton products, and I avoid them like the plague too...

Yes, I was uncertain to about that, but I kind of remembered the old winamp lite (not the Free version, the Lite one, even smaller) was small enough, and out of curiosity I downloaded and installed it removing all options but the player itself. It is acttually very small and blazing fast, at least here on my laptop (which is just an average/slow machine these days), and it takes, when idle, just 3 MB of RAM. All considered, I think it's worth a try!

Winamp certainly always used to be lighter weight than RealPlayer...

I hope other software venders look at RealAmp as an object lesson. 10--15 years after their "take over the computer" days, people are still gun-shy about them. They seem to be behaving themselves these days, but I was very nervous about putting it into my computer this time around.

Re: Norton. I haven't played with them in 10 years or so, but the last time I did Norton brought my computer to a crawl and took over everything. It will be a long time before I ever allow Symantec near my computer again. I remember the "good old days" when Peter Norton was Norton Utilities and there was nothing out there even remotely as good.

"Good old Days"... ah, yes, manually parsing IRQs and DMAs, restructuring the start-up order to maximize memory use efficiency, a big word-processing program would be about 10 megabytes and come on eight floppy-disks and take an hour and a half to install and configure. I'm telling you, this GUI stuff is just a passing fad, and it'll only be a matter of time before we get back to real computing and the ever-useful and friendly C:> prompt!

tanstaafl.