Serviio

I'm a happy Serviio user with one beef: generally Windows DLNA clients aren't that great. i generally find the experience better on my other devices.

The issue with VLC is speed... with a large library it takes a long time to cache the titles... that and the UI isn't nice.

XBMC is okay, but it's heavy when all you want to do is browse and play back media.

my Sony devices work well, and Skifta on android does a great job (I use MX Player for playback).

is there anything else on Windows worth trying?

Maybe I'm cheating, but I just play the file straight from my file browser in Windows Media Player. Of course I lose my online resources (which I can browse to anyway) and my playlists. Not as easy to find a particular movie as well, since I have over 2300 videos across 6 hard drives

You can also use the MediaBrowser interface that is included with a Pro license. That works quite well, also.

Well, yes kind of cheating...

I may go with the MediaBrowser option. Strange that there would be lots of Android options and nothing for Windows though... a Windows version of Skifta or BubbleUPNP would be perfect.