Re: ...Vista and Windows Media Player...
Its designed to do that, D: is the recovery partition with the whole system image on it. Most companies don't even give users access to that partition. On my Vaio I actually burned DVDs for the installed and wiped the drive out and recovered that 5-6 gb partition that they reserve.
I have store the system snapshots on CDs as well and I can recover from CDs if needed. I just didn't bother to wipe out the recovery drive, but now it seems to be a good idea. It's not much space though, but I know I have an option if need arises.
I can buy an external hard drive, but since this a laptop, and I am very lazy, I know I will get sick and tired of it. I have a 4 GB USB Flash drive and I guess I need to get into habit of doing a monthly (or weekly) backup on that.
The easiest way I can think of is copy all the important files/documents on the USB. Next time when I do another back up, I can either overwrite the old ones or simply choose not to copy the ones that are already there. That will add only the ones that were not copied last time because they didn't exist.