I found that XMPlay replaces Winamp perfectly.
Tiny footprint (less.than 1MB), support for all modern codecs, active development, API and plugin environment, streaming.
Combined with the minimal skin, it's my first install on any new windows machine.
In order to play HVSC[1], I switched from XMPlay to the far more heavyweight Foobar2000 because the former had a habit of crashing on files it disliked, losing playlist position.
