MP4 Plays Fine in Quicktime, but Audio Lags Near Clip's End in WMP. Huh?

Question

This is weird. I've made several MP4s in Premiere Pro CS6, some only 10 minutes long, and the audio goes a bit out of sync (lagging behind) only in WMP, not Quicktime, when playing the rendered MP4. QT plays it all just fine. Is there something needing to be set in Premiere or AME to make it all stay sync'ed and play fine in any player?
Quick backstory: I shoot 1920x1080p DSLR video at 24fps (23.97#) and I capture audio separately on a Tascam portable at 24-bit 96kHz (which is think is 29.97) and toss it onto a Pr Pro CS6 timeline. I do use the cruddy camera audio just for syncing then ALT+Click to separate the camera's audio track and delete it, leaving the now-synced good audio in place. Then I toss a few transitions and effects (mostly color grading) on the video, nothing fancy, and export out an .MP4 from Premiere which of course fires up AME. I think the problem is the preset I'm picking. A screenshot of my AME settings is attached. I am using one of the presets for Apple TV/iPad/iPhone which is basically renders the video down to 1280x720p with H.264 compression (no surprise that Quicktime plays it back without issue). I'm assuming a codec comes into play here, or just WMP being stupid? I know what a codec is but I don't Premiere which one to use (I assume you can), so if that's the answer please elaborate a bit when you answer, lol. I'm a seasoned photographer and a fairly green video editor (and a lousy video shooter, lol!).
As a further test, I sent the timeline out to an MP4 again but this time I simply chose H.264 and picked the HD 23.976 1080p preset which does use different VBR, etc. That video plays fine in both, but a 10-minute MP4 is almost 2GB! I was hoping for something in the 100mb-150mb range so I could YouSendIt out to people, and the lousy AppleTV/iPhone 4 720p H.264 preset does give me a filesize in that range.
Any thoughts on what to set to get a workable filesize of <200mb with a 720p clip that actually works in WMP as well as QT? I hope I'm even asking the question correctly.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Harm, I didn't pay attention to those settings, I should have. I got hung up in the preset names and figured those were my only choices. How green I am, lol. I made a preset with a Target of 4 (max 6) and VBR 1 Pass, and I knocked the audio down to 128K being it's just speech, and it all worked great. The new file plays in both players perfectly and also plays on my iPad with no jitter. Filesize is about 240mb but that's fine, it works. Problem solved and in the books. BTW, I use a GTX570.
Jim, I agree, VLC is super, it was the only player that would play 5D Mark II files right out of camera back in 2008, on my dual core Dell laptop with a cheesy Nvidia 7900 graphics card. Problem is, the majority of people I'm sending these MP4s to are Mums & Dads in our church, etc, and you know quite well that those folks are running some consumer Dell or HP setup they bought at Costco on closeout.
Funny backstory, when the 5D2 came out in Sept 2008, that was what thrust me into video. So I immediately bought the Prod Premium CS4 Suite (already owned Photoshop for a few years being a stills guy) and installed it on that Dell 17" laptop I mentioned above. After getting the 5D2 finally in Jan 2009, I actually had the nerve to take my first attempt at creating a video in Premiere and encoding it on that laptop. I literally had to kill AME partway through because I was seconds away from burning out my processor (I had been using RealTemp because of how hot that thing ran using Word, lol). It was that event that made me convince myself to start researching how to build a real editing PC (using an i7 920 at the time). I probably drove Harm nuts back then with all my questions, lol! But this rig has been my workhorse and has been through countless upgrades, the only thing remaining from the original 2009 build is the case and the power supply.
I know, you guys didn't need all that info, just felt like shooting the breeze. Thanks again!