I had a question for the experts here.

If one *had* (bear with me...) to rip using WMP 11, which encoders would be better to rip with for sound quality:

Fraunhofer MP3 (which I think WMP 11 is using) or WMA VBR 135-215 setting.

Thank you for your help

We need more information. You have not specified the bitrate for Fraunhofer, and it is not clear whether you are talking about WMA standard or WMA pro.

For the same bitrate I would expect WMA std. to win.

96 kbps and below wma thrashes mp3.
128 kbps and above, if your hearing is average (no special affinity for pre-echo, metallic artifacts, >16 KHz signals), you probably can't hear anything different.

If you're gonna use the MP3 option, max out the bitrate to 320kbps as there aren't that many independent tests of WMP's built in encoder.

on wmp11, there is no setting for wma pro vbr

Sorry...I have never used wmp11.

From what I hear, wma pro is significantly better that wma standard.

Yeah, but hardware support sucks, and the advantage (as with most codecs nowadays) usually only shows up at low bitrates.