Windows Media Player - sound/music skips

Windows XP MCE SP3 - The system had WMP11 and all music would skip, not like a normal skip, but kind of a reverb-overload-skip-thingy. It's hard to describe. The Windows music that plays when the desktop loads up is also doing this weird skip/reverb thing. I rolled WMP11 back to WMP10 and it did the same thing, so I reinstalled WMP11, and it still does it. So I ran KLite's Codec Tweak Tool and remove several broken codecs, and I installed the Vista Codec Pack. None of this made a difference. I then installed Media Player Classic, and all the MP3 music plays fine with Media Player Classic, but with WMP, all the music still has this weird skipping/reverb thing. Most Windows sounds are OK except for the intro music. I have run full malware scans and done full maintenance. The PC has 2gb DDR2-667 and a 120gb SATA drive that is less than 50% full. I've killed all start-up programs except for what's required and I'm about to say "screw it!".
Any ideas?

 

Yeah, I found the WOW effect before I posted and changing or turning it off made the reverb/skip thing less pronounced, but it is still there. I looked at and changed every setting in WMP that was related to sound and found that nothing actually fixed the problem.