Windows Media Player 12 just plain refused to play the mp3s of the soundtrack. Anyone else have a problem with it? (I haven't had a chance to try the files on another system or after a new download).

Yeah, same thing here.
iTunes has no problems playing them though.

Yep, me too, the soundtrack seems to be unfriendly to windows media player.
It starts, but after about 12 seconds they loop, and WMP itself is like "frozen".
Even the progress bar of the song stutters and then resets.
I guess they are coded in a way wich WMP doesn't find of his taste.
PLease fix this ASAP!!!

Same here, WMP fails to play the files. WinAMP and Nero ShowTime play MP3s without any issues though.
Curiously, the tracks are encoded with iTunes...

Nero showtime plays only the first 12 seconds or so of the tracks.
My guess is that the original midis were very short, and were edited by gog to make them last "as a song"... but the encoding process they used made the MP3s impossible to play.
Is there any chance of receiving an official answer? even something like "we will look into it"?

Looks like something is incompatible in the headers. I played a few in Winamp (2.x), and after I added a track # and hit update field, the files became playable by WMP12. So... anyone have a favorite batch tagging utility?

Hmm... could you explain what you did in more detail? Thank you.

You're not familiar with editing tags on an mp3? For instance, filling in an album name or adding a guest artist, or correcting the odd spelling error? That's all I did, and saved the change. In this case, the "track #" field was empty so I just filled that in. Then I updated the file. Basically, you just need to change any tag info and resave the mp3. The problem is just how the header info is saved. WMP12 seems to be extra-picky about that.
Any "mp3 tag editor" where you open the mp3 and edit and save should do the trick. With WMP you can edit that sort of info in explorer, but I don't think it'll fix these. At a guess you need to dig up a standalone programs use another media player. (I would not use iTunes either). Instructions should be included in whatever you get. As I said, I used Winamp 2.76, but that is really old software (almost as old as the game!)

I recommend TagScanner ( http://www.xdlab.ru/en/ ). While it definitely has a small learning curve, and is an example of function over form, it's extraordinarily powerful. I have a massive library of MP3s and use this to retag and batch-rename everything before importing into iTunes and/or Foobar.