Stuttering audio playback

About two months ago on a 10 month old Dell Inspiron 1405 (XP SP2) my audio and video playback began to stutter. I have a DVD RW drive.

When a CD is played in WMP, the sound is choppy. When a DVD movie is played the audio is choppy and appears to be slightly off of the video. The video playback appears to be unaffected. What is odd though, is I can rip a CD which plays stuttering, and when I play it back after it is ripped it plays perfectly. So the drive can read the information well enough to rip, just not playback a CD in real time. Similarly, I can burn a CD (and I've burned data DVDs) and the result is perfect playback (or data integrity).

So the drive works perfectly for all but real time playback. I get this stuttering in WMP and in Quicktime (it is actually a quicktime plug-in into a CPA CD ROM review course--I've been using this since January with no problems until about two months ago.

Here is the real kicker. I also have Nero loaded on my system, and if I play back a DVD movie (haven't tried a CD in here) the movie plays back just fine.

So, is the problem with the drive, or WMP and quicktime, or something else? I have used Windows to search for updated drivers for the DVD drive and it says I have the most up to date.

I can't send this thing off for service until I am finished sitting for the CPA exam. The drive plays back well enough to get through the video portions of the course. I would love for there to be some fix though.

Thanks all,

Drew