Media Player cannot recognise an existing library

Several years ago I embarked on the task of digitising my music collection. I acquired the tools for converting the analog signal from my record player or tape deck into digital form, cleaning up the resulting ".wav" file to remove the noise and finally splitting it down into individual tracks and converting them to ".wma" format to match files "ripped" from CD´s.
The resulting individual track files are named Track sequence + Track title and held in folders having the Album name. Neat and tidy and WMP 8, 9 and 10 could read them quite happily.
However, these versions of WMP could not differentiate between various versions of the same piece of music and simply gathers up and stuffs into the library everything that has an audio extension even recordings of noisy meetings and Police interviews.
A typical 12" vinyl record being digitised produces Side1.wav, Side2.wav, Sides 1+2.wav, depopped Sides 1+2.wav, Track1.wav, track2.wav ...............Track11.wav, Track12.wav and finally Tracks 1 to 12.wma. All of these get pulled into the library - five copies of the same piece of music. It is prudent to keep the .wav files as backup but they don´t belong in the library
When I began to organise the files ripped from CD´s I was horrified to find them completely incognito, the file name is simply the track number in a folder named unknown album plus the date and time of it´s creation and itself a sub-folder the folder Unknown Artist. Useless
I deleted everything that had been ripped and started afresh renaming everything.
I now have -
My Music, Artists, Album, Album Track1 Track2 etc. Unknown Artist, Various Artists.
and this works perfectly under WMP 10 because the only audio files it has access to are those on the USB drive.
Recently, two machines have died and been replaced by machines pre-loaded with Windows 7 and including WMP 12. Show this an existing library, mine has 6,095 tracks in 393 albums, it picks up ten albums at random and says that there is only one track in each.
To play music I have to find the album I want to hear using Windows explorer, highlight the tracks I want to play then right click and select "Play". The front screen is fine without the swirling patterns of earlier versions but the rest is useless. Reading through other posts I gather that WMP12 follows the previous versions in building it´s own library but instead of using locations it copies files across to it´s own drive. This is not acceptable behaviour for me - so
Is there a way of saying to WMP12, "My Music is on Drive x, don´t mess about copying it just use it"?.
or - have I to discard WMP12 and install WMP10?

its news to me that wmp 12 creates copies of music files to play them via its library,
i actually think it reads the library that is already set up for music, its also the same if you add more folders to the music library from different locations ,ie other hard drives ,externals.

as for renaming the tracks ripped from cd, this is how it is,
what you need to do in my opinion, is use winamp for the purpose of naming track and you will need mp3tag also.
when you have a ripped cd with the track names as track 1 track 2 etc then you make sure the folder for the album is correctly named ,open it in winamp and then highlight all the tracks/ right click them /send to/ autotag. this will fetch the metadata for that album/cd. then you open mp3tag highlight all the tracks and select tag to file name, this will change the names of the files from track 1 and so on to the actual names of the tracks, in the folder.
it seems a laborious process but when you get your head around it its really very quick and simple.

winamp has been around for a good number of years, Winamp was first released in 1997.
the method i mentioned involves little or no typing, several clicks of the mouse to rename an entire folder/cd tracklist cant be bad(regardless of size),
i used to edit filenames the way you mentioned through explorer but i got frustrated with the fifteen file limit for renaming album titles etc,
its possible to renumber an entire folder of tracks so a 3 cd album becomes one 60 track folder and so on using mp3tag.
these tools are there to make life easier and free, give it a whirl you may find your a convert after a short while. i was old school explorer too, but have learned an easier way,the hard way !
through trial and error.