If you are using the well-known Streamripper with Winamp for ripping your favorite streams on Vista you might experience a problem when disabling Streamripper. I for one, don’t need Streamripper all the time so I disable it and re-enable it only when I go for a “tunes hunt”. The user credentials stuff will give you headaches on Vista (even if you are logged in as Administrator or another user with administrator privileges). Why ? Because when you enable/disable Streamripper plugin or other Winamp plugins they will edit their config files (mostly INI files). Vista won’t let them do that so you disable Streamripper, restart Winamp and Streamripper will pop right up again as nothing happened.
In order to get rid of this issue make sure that when you open Winamp you will open it by right-clicking the shortcut icon and choosing “Run as Administrator”. All problems will go away and your changes will be saved. If you want to run it as Administrator all the time without needing to right click on the icon, then right-click on the shortcut icon once more, choose “Properties” and navigate to the “Compatibility” tab, and on the “Privilege Level” setting check the “Run this program as an Administrator” box.
That’s a pretty easy solution for this annoying problem. Hope that it will server you as it served me. Cheers.
LE: I noticed that if you choose to run Winamp “as an Administrator” then Winamp won’t be able to see the external mounted drives. For example I have mounted my 500GB WD external HDD and when I loaded a playlist that contained tunes located on the external disk Winamp started to skip all my playlist. I noticed that when I want to load a folder into Winamp’s playlist and get to the browse window I can’t see the mounted partition that is viewable from My Computer. The fix was to run Winamp normally, not with administrator privileges which conflicts with the above fix.
Winamp crashes Gtalk when “Show current music track” is enabled
If you use Gtalk and you have set the status option to “Show current music track” and use Winamp 5.xxx you will see that Gtalk has a hard time getting the information from Winamp. In order to solve this you will need to create a blank “winamp.m3u” using any kind of player that understands that format or simply by using Notepad and saving a blank file as “winamp.m3u”.