Apologize if this has been covered elsewhere, but I haven't been able to find it.

I'm using Vista32HP. In Win98 & NT I've been able to play wav files from command scripts, but in Vista nothing I've tried seems to work. Can anyone tell me how to do it? Thanks,

Do you mean, play files from "command line" (cmd) ???
If you do, yep, it can be done...
Type in command prompt (or compose a batch file to do it...)

<audio_program> /play /close <file>

Ex. to launch WMP to play a wav file
%ProgramFiles%\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe /play /close C:\music\1.wav
---------------------
hope it's work for you

Thanks for the reply, but that syntax doesn't work for me with any media player so far.

I really need this functionality to run from a batch/cmd file for audible cues for certain events. I don't want to see the player interface, and I want it to exit after playing the wave file. I've been trying to get this kind of command to work:
start /min "player.exe" /play /close "wavefile.wav"

With some media players I can get them to start minimized and play the file, but then they try to parse the /play /close switches as media files and stop with error messages. They also move the active window to the media player. With WMP, it starts but doesn't play the file, much less exit gracefully.

I know there has to be a simple way to get this done. I just can't figure out how. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Milesahead - thanks for the tip. Your method does absolutely work, but the problem is that it leaves us with a media player hanging around in memory, even if minimized. It also retains the active window, even if the batch file continues other operations.

Surprisingly to me, there's relatively little forum chatter on this specific topic under Vista, but after rooting around I did come up with a method that works fine. Requires 3 lines in a batch file:

start /min "mediaplayer" "mediafile"
timeout /T "N"
taskkill /IM "mediaplayer"

Your method for playing the file is shorter & more elegant, but this allows selecting the media player for type of file (for instance, one player for flac files, another for mp3s).
The timeout command is necessary, because otherwise the following command, taskkill, will kill the mediaplayer task before it has a chance to play the sound file. Switch /T N refers t the seconds you want to command processor to wait before loading the next line of the batch file (no quotes for seconds number) Also means you have to have a rough idea of how many seconds the soundfile takes, but that's not a big deal.
The taskkill command zaps the program from memory. For this operation you don't need a fully qualified path name, since it is looks fo the image name (vlc.exe, for example) that is in the task list. Finally, if you want to avoid extraneous info sent to the screen, redirect lines 2 and 3 to nul.

Thanks again for taking an interest.

Sounds really useful. Will definitely check it out.