Windows Media Player 12 Sucks Eggs

[Tim De Baets]

The only real things that bug me are the loosing of play counts and ratings...

That's definitely not normal. What's the file type (or types) of your music files? Resetting the media library database might help - see my instructions in this thread.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the visualizations would actually run at your screen resolution instead of 640 by 400 in the 10 series.

What's the name of the visualization? Some visualizations allow you to customize the screen resolution: in WMP, press Ctrl+M and go to Tools - Options - Plug-ins - Visualizations, select the visualization and click Properties.