MP3 Player won't work with WMP11 on Vista Home Basic Edition

I have a SONY Walkman MP3 player and I have been trying to use it with WMP11
on my laptop running Vista Home Basic Edition. At first, when I connected it
to the laptop, "Walkman" was listed as a device but the laptop kept on trying
to install the device drivers and would fail each time. I finally located
this post
http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-9...tting-detected
and followed the directions, which took care of the "Installing Device
Drivers" message and ensuing failure message.

Yet, I still can't access the contents of the Walkman on WMP11, nor can I
sync it.

I can add music to it via Windows Explorer, but I can't create playlists
that way so I really want to use WMP11.

The Sony support site is of no help, as I have downloaded all the latest
downloads to no avail, and the MP3 firmware is already up to date.

The Microsoft WMP support pages are of no help as they talk about WMP11 with
XP and WMP11 with Windows 7 but not specifically with Windows Vista. I did
locate an article that mentions that if a device isn't recognized by WMP11 on
XP, I should rollback to WMP10, but again the explanations are not for
Windows Vista.

I found the following site
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/w...les/51859.aspx that
explains how to remove WMP11 from Vista but when I open Programs and Drivers
WMP is not listed there.

The same MP3 player works just fine with WMP11 on XP on another machine so
I'm not sure it's a WMP issue but I thought I'd ask here anyway.

I am pulling my hair out at this point. Any suggestions?