16 byte alignment

Has anyone been able to successfully compile mplayer with the latest 
cygwin gcc 4.3.2 and binutils ?
If so then why am I getting 8 byte alignment of variables even when 
declared with  __attribute__((aligned(16))) ?

The SSE instructions accessing non-16byte aligned data is causing 
segment faults. I cannot understand why no one else is complaining of 
such a significante problem.