Well, I've been playing with it a little more tonight. And there definitely is a noticiable difference between using the mapped share and media server.
Both are going across the same NIC so I wouldn't think it would be a utilization problem. Just in case I've been keeping an eye on the utilization with the built in XP stuff. (Thanx for pointing that out by the way) Playing mp3's off the share the utilization doesn't ever seem to go over 1%. I can force it to go higher if I start switching songs alot. While using the shared library with Media Server it seems to hover right around there too. Except while switching songs, it shoots to around 2%-4% usually. This would seem to me, that it should be performing better. Or that it's having a problem getting the stream off the remote PC. It's really kind of a toss up, depending on how you look at it.
On the plus side though, if I don't switch tracks and let them just finish on their own. The delay in between them goes down to no more than 3 seconds. Considering what it's doing, I can probably live with that. It would be VERY nice if there were some options to tweak though. Something like eat all the bandwidth you can, all the time would be nice.
Like I said, for me this won't ever see the public side of my network. And at least currently it's about the only thing using that NIC.
I do have another question though. Is there an "easy" way to convert a playlist I have in my default library to use the library from the Media Server? I can recreate them, there aren't that many, but it would be nice to not have to.