DVD playback... occasional frame skip

[Pandaren]

I refurbished a P3-750 machine to use as a DVD player/Media Center.

Windows XP Pro, DX-9, Cat 4.2 drivers
Radeon 7200 series video card

This thing had no other software so I paid $15 for PowerDVD's add on pack to play DVDs in Windows Media Player 9.

I get a frame skip every 5 mins or so I checked CPU usage and it remains at 20-30% all the time.

What could possibly be wrong?

Edit: The skipping only seems to happen in WMP9. When I use the PowerDVD software by itself, it's fine. Its just when I use it as a plugin for WMP9 that this happens

 

[mike6099]

I don't know your answer but i'm giving this a bump for curiosity

 

[vshah]

what ide channel is your dvd drive on. same as your windows drive?
it might be some service that accesses the disk at regular intervals. maybe something like disk indexing.

i remember i used to get jerks in playback using onboard sound when i had mbm5 running...perhaps this is something similar.

-Vivan