Windows Media Player won't let go of MP3 association

Okay, I've researched online and it appears that I can't uninstall Media Player as I really want to, but at least can some nice person tell me how I can stop Media Player's persistent hijack of the association between itself and MP3 files?

I associated MP3 files with another player, and its icon shows in all explorer and Powerdesk listings of MP3 files, yet when I click on one it's always WMP that comes up and starts playing the file. I've kept doing the "Choose default program for this filetype" thing, but it makes no difference. Also, in WPM I looked at its file associations and it showed my chosen player as being associated with MP3, so there was apparently nothing for me to change in WPM.

I never had this issue in XP.

There is thus clearly some other thing I need to change - presumably some registry setting, before non-WPM music file associations (at least MP3) can actually work on my system. Anyone any ideas, please? Many thanks.

Kind regards,

This is now resolved. I did a thorough uninstall of my MP3 player (the Thomson mp3Pro player) and then reinstalled it, and all ran correctly then.

However, this was not a straightforward task because for some reason the player's downloaded executable terminated with some Windows message sound but no actual message - something that didn't happen in my previous Vista installation, so it was not necessarily anything to do with Vista itself. I couldn't find a way round this behaviour (and was stymied for a couple of days) - until I got the sneaky idea to use 7Zip to look inside the downloaded executable. In it I found a folder containing the actual installer and all necessary files, so I simply extracted those to a temporary folder, ran the setup program, and then the player was then properly installed.