I need to read the attributes of windows media files, audio and video. I can do it by automating the Media Encoder but we really don't want to force that 10MB full GUI onto the user machines, is there a way to do this directly?

"Directly"? Yeah, you can get the ASF/WM format spec and parse, but Perl or PHP would be the better tool for that.
We made a demo app for you that shows the SDK attribute code ported to VB.Net, it should get you started ...