Windows media player doesn't play midi reliably at all

I’ve tried putting it in a container control,
Adding it and loading and playing it in the open event of a window.
On the odd window, AXWMP would work but not on anything else but the start window.
So, for midi, media player is rubbish (in windows - mac is great). I have all the MBS plugins.

I can’t get it to work at all with midi files.
We never had this problem with quicktime (although there was sometimes a rubbish sound explosion at the start of playing a midi file - and also we had to install Quicktime before our app would work). I want to get rid of 3rd party installs just so that my app would work (- lost sales)

Has anybody got any suggestions?
Cheers,
Sean