Audio and Sound glitches, stutter, freezes

I am experiencing an interrmittent problem in Vista 64.

When i am watching a film (normally via Videolan player) or gaming online I experience occassional second/two second long glitches where the sound and video of the media i am watching freezes for a split second.

This causes a buzzing sound (presumably this is the audio stuttering).

It isn't lag and the play back is not constantly choppy. The files (gaming and video) are played from my hard drives not my DVD drive.

My system setup is as follows:

Akasa Eclipse case w/ 2 x Nexus 120mm fans
E6750 w/ Scythe Ninja cooler and Nexus 120mm fan
Gigabyte P35 DS3 mobo
OCZ Vista gold 4GB (2 x 2GB) PC26400 DDR2 RAM
XFX 8800GT GPU w/ Arctic Cooling Accelero 1 rev 2 (Turbo module attached)
Samsung 203B DVD
Corsair 620w Modular PSU
Terratec Phase 28 Sound card

My OS is on a 250GB Seagate SATA II HDD and i have various other HDD as storage.

Any help would be gratefully accepted as it is driving me nuts. I have spent a lot of money on this new rig and am pretty tempted to go back to XP...

I have the latest drivers for everything also.

Thanks

You have a powerfull machine.. that's not the problem.
Is your antivirus scanning or what is the configuration of it?
Is your Bios updated? Is your sound (and other)driver(s) updated?
Did you check your task manager CPU/Memory etc... use?
Check Control Panel/ performance Information and Tools/ this will help you alot

I don't know about online gaming as I have never done it, but the following may help your problems with the Videolan player. What are the cache settings for this program? If they are set too high, you may experience delays before playback begins, however once started playback should be able to continue without a break. If, however, the cache is set at too low a value, then it is possible that the cache may be emptied quicker than it can be filled. This can lead to pauses whilst the cache is being refilled. The rate of fill and emptying of the cache depends on the content of the video. It is all about choosing a good compromise for the settings of the cache. This is something that you can control. What you can't control is the Internet. All it needs is for 1 server on the path between you and the data source to go down, and your system and the Internet have to find an alternative route between it and the data source. This can occasionally cause pauses in the transfer of certain files. Setting a suitable cache size can help reduce, but not totally eliminate, this sort of problem.
Dwarf