After downloading virtualmidisynth and one of the recommended soundfont banks, I was very impressed with the quality. After playing several of my midi files, I began to notice that the songs were not quite completing correctly. I tried changing my default player from Windows Media Player to dbpoweramp, winamp, etc. without any success. After a couple of days of trying, I started to pour over your coments....all 12 pages....and I saw your comment on this exact problem. You stated that unfortunately, there was no solution to this because virtualmidisynth runs as a DLL....and Windows 7 clears this out quickly when the song file has completed.
Before finally giving up on this, I decided to search for other free midi players to see if I could find one that worked. I ended up with the one you first recommended....namely Van Basco's Karaoke player.
Instead of naming virtualmidysynth as my default, I named Van Basco's Karaoke player as the default. Voila! Now I can play music on ALL of my players, Windows Media Player, dbpoweramp, etc. without losing the end of the Midi file. I also picked up a neat midi program called "Notation Player" that works well, and shows the sheet music. Everything now runs fine, now that I have set my default player as Van Blasco's Kareoke player. Technically, I really don't understand WHY this works.....but....it does, and that's fine by me. I hope this will help others who had this problem.
Best Regards,
Tom Weber