Album art
Standard WMP reduces all album art to 200x200.
However, there was a trick to circumnavigate this restriction.
Overwrite the Folder.jpg with something bigger and in WMP11 ‘now playing’ view you have the full size image.
In WMP12 this simply don’t work anymore.
You can overwrite Folder.jpg, embed the artwork in the song, nothing works, all you get is a 240x240 in Now Playing, even in full screen mode.
Dale Preston has more
A hack from a forum
if you add the below values it appears that WMP will NOT generate or resize new folder.jpg OR AlbumArtSmall.jpg files. IF folder.jpg (or AlbumArtSmall) already exist(s), it does not resize it but mearly sets the HIDDEN and SYSTEM attributes. so if you have a folder.jpg and/or an albumartsmall.jpg file at 1500x1500, it will leave them alone (except for hiding them...).
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences]
"LargeAlbumArtSize"=dword:ffffffff
"SmallAlbumArtSize"=dword:ffffffff
As a consequence, WMP12 won’t create any artwork. So if you use ‘Find Album info’, you won’t get any artwork.
The moment you put a Folder.jpg in the directory, WMP12 will display it.
It looks like this hack indeed prevent WMP12 from meddling with the artwork at the expense of supplying it manually