The reason I asked on here about what Nila meant was because I'd been looking for a utility that could sit in the taskbar somewhere and generate the windows multimedia messages to control Media Center.
In the meantime, I just used a tiny mini-me skin.
Now I know how to do it - and really am wondering how many other things I don't know! - but I'm probably going to stick with the Caliber mini-me skin just because it's probably closer to what I want, but it's pretty good to know what you can do.
What it has given me though is the answer to something I'd been wanting to do for a long time: have Media Center speak the name of the track on demand (I know that might sound weird, but I've got a wireless speaker set-up and a wireless remote control, and I'm quite often too far away to be able to see the screen and know what the track is that's playing - so I'll now be able to set up one of the remote buttons to run a program that grabs the name of the currently playing track and bungs it through to the Windows Speech Engine...)