Looking for a windowless sound player for Windows XP

[Ogbar]

A friend of mine is writing a Tcl/Tk script (a Sudoku app) and wants to incorporate sound in it. Tcl/Tk does not have direct sound support, but it can call other applications just fine. The problem is, in the Windows environment, every wave player app we can think of wants to pop open a window with slider, etc, everytime it is called. He'd like to find a sound player that can be run "in the background": a command line app, a windowed app that has the option of not spawning a window, anything that works. If you have to launch a sound server first, that works too, just so long as a window doesn't pop up every time a sound file is played.

Anyone have any leads?