Steady on there, old Peerless !!!

You are not alone in your true knowledge re: the real evilness of Real Player... Bad Boogie, for sure...

I assume that it is now established that the downloaded goodies are OK except when an attempt is made to have Real Player do what it is supposed to do... In other words, they work fine when out of the nasty clutches of el basura Real Player
And there's a comment that all was fine and dandy in the valley until that LimeWire Pro thing arrived on the seen... Right ?

One thing for B D to try would be to install the basic set of codecs available from Nimo... I know others who have been successful with Real Player only after getting their codecs 'right' with Nimo... Makes WMP almost acceptable, as well !!!

If you want to try it, B D... Just click on the Nimo Codecs link in my sig below...

It would also be a very good idea to run Task Manager and see what sort of processor usage Real Player is gobbling up...

Last, see if there are any updates of drivers for the sound card.

Oooh, and be sure to disable any possibility of the player in LimeWire grabbing any 'associations'...

__________________
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Tomorrow's forecast:
Sunni in places, Shi'ite in others...