This morning the little kid across the road spent well over an hour tunelessly blowing on a penny whistle or a recorder or some such instrument of torture. My first thought was to put some music on and drown the little bastard out, but my computer picked this moment to fail me. Playing music on the computer has always worked before, but suddenly today it isn't working. At first I thought it was noisy - some kind of static. Upon closer listening, thought, I think that it is stuttering very rapidly on brief sections of the music and then moving on. The effect is most unpleasant. Have any of you encountered such a problem before? More importantly, have any of you come up with a solution to a similar problem before?

Technical details:

- Running XP

- The machine has plenty of memory, CPU power etc. - it's always worked before

- I'm not running out of disk space

- The problem shows up with Windows media player, itunes and one other media player I tried. I suppose this means that the problem is at a lower level (codec? driver?)

- It gets worse when the computer is busy (searching, opening a document, etc), but it is there to some extent even when the computer is doing nothing else.

- I've checked all of the physical connections, and they appear fine

Thanks for any help you can offer - the kid's not playing his pipe at the moment, but he could start again at any time, so this is an urgent request...