Windows Media Player - Need help with bad performance

I am having extremely annoying issues with idiotic windows media player that I have NEVER had before in a lifetime of using the application.
I noticed the problem only this afternoon when the application began to respond slowly.
I open up task manger and then open WMP to play a music track or a video, I check the process in the processes tab and the app begins to use around 50 percent of each core, the memory usage also creeps up from around 30mb to 150mb. I check the performance tab and it’s using 90% of both cores (I have a C2D E6400). As tracks come to the end, they become choppy and start to skip slightly. Videos are choppy too, and the sound goes out of sync when you try to jump to a different section using the slider. When I close WMP, its process remains in the memory consuming just as much resources as it was when I was playing the track. It’s kinda impossible to do anything else with the computer at the time. The only way to stop it is to terminate the process from the processes tab. I tried restarting my computer (I leave it on 24/7) so at first I figured that was the problem, but it wasn’t, so I ran a virus scan, and that didn’t solve anything either.

I took two screenshots to show you how much resources it is consuming.
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

What’s wrong?