An apology and a compliment
 

The first time I installed I complained a lot about the high CPU usage of winamp3.

At the time I used the skin Zygote, and later I found out, after I switched to an alternate skin, that the CPU usage dropped BELOW the usage of the 'old' WA2. (from 2% to 1% or less on my XP1800+)
The RAM usage is still higher than that of WA2, but on my system that doesn't really matter.. It max at about 30-35 MB of ram usage. But thats of no real concern as long as the CPU usage stays low, as it does. Even DivX playback works great (using about 15% of my CPU)

So I compliment the WA team for making a more fluent and better looking version of WA... but look into the problem of the Zygote skin, as it does take up an unfair amount of my CPU usage.
The other skins works fine as far as I can tell after a day of hard WA3 use.

Blame the coder for the skin, not the devs over at Nullsoft. A skin can be coded to take 100% CPU usage or even 1%. So, it depends upon the skin-coder, not wa3.

Actually the last remark was pointed at the skin-coder.

I think excessive use of desktop alpha is to blame. A skin can look good with out it... I use Koalla_2, uses around 5-10% of my cpu.