This must only be a problem for people named Tony, because I reported a variant of this problem here a couple days ago. The caveat is that there were other (non-root) playlists that didn't work, and I hadn't tried pasting the URL's directly into the WinAMP location dialog.

Well I just upgraded to v188 and my root playlist is a little too large to load entirely, but I can confirm that clicking the "Play" link at the top of the root playlist doesn't work, while cut-n-pasting the URL into WinAMP does (though it would take several minutes to load the m3u for all my songs.)

However I still have the same problem with some of my other playlists, especially the root ones. If I dig down deeper into my hierarchy, I can find playlists (my album playlists, for instance) which play fine when clicked in IE. All of the ones that don't play in IE play fine when I cut and paste the URL into WinAMP.

So something is definitely funky with IE. This is IE 6.0 under Windows 2000.