I have no idea how it happened, but my media player disappeared.  The wmplayer.exe file was gone.  Re-installing has been met with the following error message:

There is a more recent version of Windows Media Player (11.0.6000.6344) already installed on your computer.  It is not possible to use an older installation package (11.0.5721.5146) to install files or to repair your current version of the player. 

I got the error even after I edited the registry and removed everything I could find that was WMP11 related.  Its been like this for a few months, so restoring is not possible.

Is there any way to reinstall WMP without reinstalling Vista? 

Thanks,

ED