So I upgraded my XP laptop to SP2 today, which was alright. I figured
what the heck, and had it install WMP10, too.  Just for fun, I played
with WMP10 a little, and then I started laughing. It was just such a
joke of a product-- it actually makes iTunes look GOOD to me!

Don't get me started on how ridiculous it is that they are at version
10, either. What a joke.

Now I could go off on the 10 easy to reproduce bugs I noticed, or 
how it took it 10 minutes to scan all of my music (that WA5 would 
do in about 45 seconds), or how it got much of the metadata wrong, 
or how its music database was 20mb (vs WA5's 2mb database), etc, 
but I won't, instead:

I played with it a little more, and started messing with its 
visualization effects. These are even more pathetic! One of them was
even a nearly exact copy of the rotating 3d dot spectrum analyzer I
originally wrote back in like 1997, that did manage to end up as an
AVS effect. It just amazes me how shitty of a product this can be.
So I figured, there have to be some better visualizations out there
for it, right? So I went and checked out their site, and the best
thing I could find was G-force (which now they are trying to sell
G-Force Gold for $10), and I laughed even more. G-Force is such a
piece of crap. I mean really! Compare it to AVS or Milkdrop, and 
they just aren't in the same league. 

COME ON PEOPLE. I haven't touched AVS in over a year, it's been
out for over 6 years, and the only thing that I've seen that
comes close is shit that Geiss did (cheers, Ryan). OK so there
are some decent newer 3d accelerated plugins too, but those
really aren't the same if you ask me...