Need help with laptop running XP and MP-11

I am trying to resolve an issue with my wife's laptop and Windows Media Player 11. She has an IBM T42 running XP Pro, SP2 and all current BIOS, hardware and OS updates. The machine has 512 megs of RAM. WMP-11 has taken to some odd behavior lately. Here are the symptoms as best I can describe.

When clicking on a media file, WMP will open and run just fine. I have not tried all media files associated with WMP yet. But, when launching WMP by itself while logged into her user account, the program begins to load and generates a blue screen momentarily describing a fault in a non paging area. I have not been able to record the entire fault but the event log will post something about category (102) event 1003. I'm presuming this is a memory conflict of some sort.

Here's the odd circumstance. Though she has an administrator account, If I log on using THE administrator account, WMP runs fine. As well, If I launch WMP from her account using the "run as" and use the administrator account, WMP runs fine.

My wife is a school teacher and and used her laptop at the school...mostly for educational purposes. She spends lots of time on line and has crapped up her computer with a variety of media software including Quick Time, Real Player and, perhaps others. It needs a good cleanup for sure.

Here's what I've tried. I've scanned for viri and other pests. Nothing threatening was found. I've reinstalled WMP using the latest file from MS from the administrator account but no help. I installed WMP from my wifes account using run as administrator. Again, same problem. I am currently busy trying to stop some services and uncheck some the crap loaded at startup but have yet to find a sweet spot. I have ordered additional RAM as her laptop has gotten sluggish and takes a long time to load. I've told her she may have to live with this or be faced with a full system restore and rebuild of all her programs. That's not a happy option yet. Any help would be appreciated.