Hi Nr,
Well I have looked for ages for a replacement for Media Player and Real Player because I found them slow in operation and memory hungry, with having to managed 11000 mp3 tracks I have stored, I found a great bit of software which is fast and never crashes, it has made my computer feel like a 3meg machine, the up side is you can try it for free for a month, but then you have to buy it, but it is worth it if you have a large catalogue of music.
http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/