Why does Windows Media Player hate me?

First off, let me just say that I'm a Linux girl. I was kinda thrust into using Windows Vista just recently, for school purposes, and I'm still trying to get used to all of the software. When I was using Linux, I used Kaffine for my video player and Banshee for my music player. I thought that WMP would be just as good, maybe even better since I should only need the one program for both my music and my videos. But so far, I've had nothing but frustrations. WMP won't play any of my AVI movie files. It also won't play my FLV movie clips, like my downloaded YouTubes. I can't figure out how to change the skin, and I can't minimize it to the taskbar. I can't add a single song to the music library without having to monitor the whole folder. And I can't update things like album art by hand. Am I doing something wrong? Is this just how things are? Is there a better media player that I could use that would fit my needs? Thanks in advance…

There are many options better than that, TBH not many people use it AFAIK, the problem is it doesn't have the codecs and\or it can't handle those formats, but the fact your wanting to use a variety of formats means you may need more than 1 media player.
VLC is a great all round player, it can handle video and audio, and for the most part will play most things, but it wont touch album art, MediaMonkey is a great audio player, and it allows you a lot of control over your music from editing tags to getting album art, but it wont play videos, so you may want to consider using both, use VLC for video, and MediaMonkey for audio, then when you find files they wont play let us know and we can talk you through some options, hope this gets you started anyway.

Thanks 8210GUY! I've used VLC for movies before, but I've never even heard of MediaMonkey. I downloaded it, and I love it! I don't mind having two separate media players, and it looks like these two will fit my needs (and wants) perfectly. Thanks again!