I had a thought that perhaps it might be useful to see the netstat information while starting up WMP. So attached are a pair of files.

In the first I started netstat following a reboot, then with netstat running I started WMP. It took about 16 seconds for the mp3 to start playing.

For the second file, I repeated the process, except the computer was not freshly re-booted and WMP had been run and had played an mp3 file. WMP started instantly in that case.

Maybe there will be something useful there, maybe not.

tanstaafl.