Free audio-editing software

"Audacity The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor"
"Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to: Record live audio. Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs. Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files. Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together. Change the speed or pitch of a recording. And more! See the complete list of features." -

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Wavosaur - free audio editor
"Wavosaur is a free sound editor, audio editor, wav editor software for editing, processing and recording sounds, wav and mp3 files. Wavosaur has all the features to edit audio (cut, copy, paste, etc.) produce music loops, analyze, record, batch convert. Wavosaur supports VST plugins, ASIO driver, multichannel wav files, real time effect processing. The program has no installer and doesn't write in the registry. Use it as a free mp3 editor, for mastering, sound design. The Wavosaur freeware audio editor works on Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows Vista." -

http://www.wavosaur.com/

Free audio-editing software
WavePad from http://www.nch.com.au/

"Q. Is WavePad really free? Yes. We make WavePad free in the hope you will like it and buy WavePad Masters Edition in the future."

"WavePad Sound Editor Professional Audio Editing Software This audio editing software is a full featured professional sound editor for Windows or Mac. It lets you make and edit music, voice and other audio recordings. When editing audio files you can cut, copy and paste parts of recordings and, if required, add effects like echo, amplification and noise reduction. WavePad works as a wav editor or mp3 editor but it also supports a number of other file formats including vox, gsm, real audio, au, aif, flac, ogg and more."

A free sound file format converter
Switch Sound File Conversion Software is a free utility that converts wav, mp3, ogg, flac, aac, wma, au, aiff, ogg, msv, dvf, vox, atrac, gsm, dss and other file formats into the mp3 or wav formats. A paid-for version can deal with even more formats, but the free version should meet the needs of most users. There are other sound utilities made available from the site, all of which work together to provide an impressive sound-processing suite. All versions of Windows versions are supported and the file size is only 312KB. - http://nch.com.au/switch/index.html

DeepRipper - Free powerful AudioCD ripping utility

"DeepRipper is freeware that can convert music files from AudioCDs into practically any format you'd like, including: MP3, WAV, OGG, and others. DeepRipper offers sophisticated encoding settings, but comes with ready made embedded sound quality presets. DeepRipper is a stand-alone application and doesn't need [the paid-for] DeepBurner to run." - http://www.deepburner.com/

Going back to Windows Media Player 6.5
If you dislike using Windows Media Player 9.0 as much many people do, then you can take a trip back in time to when good old version 6.5 was king. It runs all of the codecs that version 9.0 does, but doesn't use nearly as much of the system resources. Just enter mplayer2 in the Start => Run box in any version of Windows that could run version 6.5, and then browse to open a media file.