[robbie]

I had a customer of mine that had a laptop that had a DVD player in it. He brought it in to play me a DVD once. So we popped in the DVD and started to watch it but it would stall alot and the sound would pop (just like yours did)

So I killed the DVD program that was running and checked to see what's going on in his task manager (win2000) seems he had something like 46 services running and about 9 of those were viruses all fighting for cpu time. After I killed a few tasks (errr more like 15 of them) things started to work a little better and fasters.

We jumped on the web and went to www.trendmicro.com for there free online virus scanner. Turns out he had about 27 viruses and about 400+ infected files. TM couldn't remove them all so I had to manually go in and get rid of a few.

After that, we could watch the DVD. I noticed that you haven't checked for viruses. Maybe give that a shot?
Rob