Yeah, I have to use WMP8 here at work and they allow me to rip some of my CD's to wma, just for convenience and I have noticed the ads. Yeah, it's pretty stupid.
As for wma's, I can't claim to know all about them and I certainly don't want to turn this thread into a flame. Audio-wise, my work comp (a Dell Optiplex GX150 with the cheaper Harman/Kardon speakers) is not as good as my home system. I have only used wma's at home a couple of times so my opinion may not be based on a fair evaluation. However, in my experience, wma's are FAR inferior to mp3's sound quality wise. Overall fidelity is off, the sound is not as clear and crisp, volume levels between different aspects of the music are unbalanced, and (especially if you use the "WOW" effect) some parts of the music tend to wash out other parts.
Now if you're comparing your ripped wma's to low quality, low bitrate mp3's that you "got" off Kazaa... well, that's not a fair comparision either.
If you're gonna rip your own CD's, I recommend ripping to mp3 with a front-end that uses the latest version of LAME. I personally use Easy CD-DA Extractor, very cheap shareware, loaded with features. Tests have proven, LAME-encoded mp3's at 256kbps (or better, either ABR or CBR) are indistinguishable for the original CD. It doesn't get any better than that.
Just my $0.02
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