I am drowning in media players!

I have several systems capable of running Windows 9x. I'm going to categorize them thusly:

• High-end 486, DX4, and standard Pentium
• Pentium MMX (representative of which is the MMX/233)
• Low-end Pentium II/III class
• High-end Pentium III and Pentium 4

I am, right now, targeting, at minimum, the MMX/233 era systems for performance for media players. Mostly because I know I can get acceptable quality MPEG-1 video files to play on them and stream over HTTP, with caveats mentioned below...

I have tested the following media players:

For streaming media files over HTTP

• Windows Media Player 6.4: Not good. Only supports ASF and is utterly idiotic about what streams it will accept. Works on 95 and 98.
• Media Player Classic (with the K-Lite codec pack): does everything, but is very slow
• VLC 0.8.6i: Eh. It also does everything but it will slowly begin to clog the arteries of your computer the longer it remains open. Very annoying... you play a video and 5 minutes in it begins to start slowing down, until you have to stop it and restart your computer.

For just playing media files:
WMP 6.4 is probably the best here, as long as you install all the codecs you need for it. It seems to be the fastest at pretty much everything. WMP 9 also does a pretty good job! But it only works on 98SE, I think.

Can anyone recommend any other media players? I would really love something that:

• Is very fast and not resource-heavy, and doesn't cause your computer to progressively slow to a crawl the longer it remains open
• Streams media files over HTTP
• Supports the usual formats (MP3, MPEG-1/2/4, AVI, etc.)