Mercifully, foobar2000's interface doesn't seem to be skinnable and it uses standard Windows controls. In the screenshot of a playlist window to the right, you can see some nice features like the playing order being available in a readable dropdown list and different playlists appearing as tabbed pages.
There are several other very nice touches about the user interfaces. There's an option to have notifications of song changes pop up in the systray (sorry, "toolbar notification area"). There's an example of this in the screenshot to the left - it normally just pops up the song title, but in this case there's no title tag, so the filename is used instead.
I also like the way that the "Default" play order is to play the next song in the playlist, unless you've highlighted a song other than the current one, in which case it jumps to that next without reordering the playlist.
My CDROM is broken at the moment, so I can't test this.
My CDROM is broken at the moment, so I can't test this.
In some weeks of use, foobar2000 has only hung once, and that coincided with a warning from Windows that I shouldn't remove my CDROM drive without stopping the device first. (Needless to say, I hadn't tried to do any such thing. :-) The memory requirements of the program seem quite reasonable.
In the default configuration, there's a small element of the user interface that probably counts as a visualization, but it's very discrete and can be removed with its context menu. (See the screenshot to the right.) It's so inoffensive and easy to remove that I consider this a pass.
foobar2000 is typically very fast to start up.
This is good for me. There are a number of options that you can tweak to alter the CPU usage anyway, such as various DSP options, a thread priority slider and whether to generate replaygain information for each track....
foobar2000 has ideal behaviour in this case - you get a progress bar if adding the directory is taking a while, and it adds the files in alphabetical order.
There's no output plugin for ESD at the moment, AFAICT. No doubt it wouldn't be difficult to write one.
I don't think foobar2000 does this, but the personal firewall software I'm using is so hosed that I haven't been using it recently, so I'm not likely to have spotted anything.
I don't think it does this either, but with the same proviso as in the point above.
There is Ogg Vorbis support in foobar2000. In fact, the support for .ogg files seems to be rather better than WinAmp, in that seeking within a song works properly in all the cases I've tried.
foobar2000 doesn't display any HTML rendering ambitions...