Pandora skipping

I'm encountering skipping while playing streaming music on Pandora One, subscription service.

This is a totally new occurrence on Pandora and I've applied all of the "fixes" supplied by Pandora Support, no joy. The skipping occurs at the first few seconds of EACH song.

I'm using the Normal Quality setting. I have 5 bars of signal strength.

My system: Win 7/64. Intel Quad core, i7. 500 GB free space on 1TB HDD.

All other audio sources (YouTube; Audio CDs; music from HDD; etc.) work flawlessly.

Totally frustrated. Help.

TIA:cry:-o