*hypf*

Yesterday, shortly after finally setting up my other machine again, I decided to give Winamp another try. I used it as my main audio player back when I still used Windows 2000 but since I switched to Vista I converted to Windows Media Player, because I liked the look and feel of having my music collection with cover images, etc. all in one place. It proved to be somewhat slow on my old Pentium 4 2.53 GHz, though.

Enter Winamp. On Windows Vista. First start, it displays a nice dialog with skin selection (I didn't install any skins, so why that part in the dialog), the possibility to select file associations and whether or not you want to send anonymous usage statistics.

Fun thing here is: After wading through that dialog Winamp requests administrative privileges. Twice! And once every time you start Winamp again. I just wonder why. Neither file associations or anything else I found in the options Winamp would do needs administrative privileges. Nothing. Granting the request once (as was needed for Eclipse 3.3 to work properly) didn't change anything, Winamp still pesters me every time I start it.

And since I only have one keyboard, one mouse and one monitor here I either have to switch input devices or use Remote Desktop Connection. I went for the latter, for the most part and I figured since some command line work and music playing doesn't need many colors I could well use 8 bit color depth.

Well, turns out that Winamp likes to crash with only 256 colors. I don't know whether the music if should play is that colorful, but it reproduceably died right at startup. Only when I changed to a higher color depth the problem went away. Weird.

And as a side note: Winamp's media library is (at least to me) much more confusing than the Windows Media Player one and not exactly faster, so maybe I drop Winamp again.

UPDATE (2008–09–04 18:24): The UAC thing is solved now. There is a well-hidden option „Restore file associations at Winamp start-up“ that was responsible for that. Unticking the box solves the issue. However, I have to stress that maintaining file associations is something you can do without adminstrative privileges.