Can anyone explain this?
My new DAW software running on Win7 64, produces 24 bit wav files by default. On that machine, they will play in Gom player and WMP, but not in Mixxx or Virtual DJ.
On my XP 32 machine they'll play in VLC and Audacity, but not in WMP or Gom Player (both of them appear to play the files, showing progress, but there's nowt but silence).
As WAV files are a container file that that may contain a variety of codecs I'm gonna guess that your XP system hasn't got the correct system wide codecs installed to play them but VLC and audacity have the correct codec built in.