Windows media player/MID files/output

I really don't know where to start on this problem, so here is as good as any.

WMP 12.0, Windows 7-64bit, MID files, Dell laptop, Sony VAIO Vista SP1, Yamaha Motif rack, Sonar 6.  

I'm a single act musician.  I create my backing tracks on the Sony laptop in Sonar6, then Save As .mid files.  On the gig I play the MID files with WMP thru the Motif rack.  Sounds great.   This has been working for a few years, but not without its problems.  

Every 10 gigs or so my older Sony laptop will simply stop playing (hang) in the middle of a song.  Very not cool.  The only way to fix this is to power down the computer by holding the power key, then rebooting into Safe Mode, then rebooting normally.  Takes time, and on a gig it's just not acceptable.  

I recenty changed to WMP 12 on my Dell W7 64-bit laptop.  Now I have another annoying problem.. intermittent output dropout (only when idle).   To get WMP's output to appear at a USB port you must hack the registry under the \activemovie\devenum entry.  That's not a problem and is a known issue since MS decided back in Vista days to remove that option.  Sigh.  Anyway, if WMP sits for 30 seconds or so, it tends to 'lose' that output connection.  I can start a song and hear nothing.  If I start it again, it's fine.  Not a huge deal, but annoying.  Fortunately this has not yet happened during a song.

My first thought is to find a better MID file player.  Is there one?  Is there a more suitable forum for this question?

Back in the 90's when I was part of a duo, we used a midi player called Showplay from a laptop. It was absolutely bullet proof and never once crashed in ten years of use and a number of updates. Back then it could only handle midi files.
 
It's best features were that you could scroll through while a song is playing, to select the next. No down time and instant start, although you need a partner to take advantage of that feature. It would also accept .txt and .rtf files of the same name as your song and dislpay the lyric or chords during the play back. 
 
Before Showplay I tried all sort of players including then hardware midifilers of the day from Yamaha and Roland. Even Cakewalk's built in jukebox feature. Everything was problematic and clunky.
 
It is still available from www.showplay.com and now will handle mp3's as well as midi. Check it out.