WMP12 backup album art

As everybody well knows now, WMP12 just sucks when it comes to album art. Case in point, everytime I transfer my music files to a new computer (along with the album art .jpgs), or re-install windows, WMP no longer recognizes my album art. When WMP builds my libraries again, the album picture no longer shows up, instead its just the generic music note. I am so sick of going through 9 gb of music and re-applying album info. I have used WMP to "update album info" on all my singles and albums multiple times.
Well, it just happened again! And I have never been able to find a solution that works. I've tried deleting the cache and data files from the local app data directories according to Gornot's thread (Rebuild Corrupted Libraries, from a few years ago). I've tried the Metadata backup utility by Dale. I've copied and pasted all the music files along with all the AlbumArt_{insert hexadecimal nonsense here}.jpg files to an external hdd and then c/p'd them back to internal hdd after windows installed. WMP12 just can't seem to hang on to the album art. Does anybody know of any tricks to backup the album art and maintain the mysterious connections between the .mp3 and the .jpg files? Or better yet, an easy way to embed the .jpgs into the corresponding .mp3s that wmp 12 downloads? (for next time...)

Thank you

Open the music files in your tag editor and see if they contain the album art or not. If the album arts are there, the situation should not occur. It is bad that you may need to re-tag all the files. After tagging, check the read only file attribute for the music files. From the next time, they will not be missing.