Media Player - Stalls on all media for a brief moment

[coach]

Hi there

When playing music (or any other media in fact) through media player, it kind of stalls briefly every few seconds, letting out a metallic "rrrrrrrrr" sound and then caries on. Very annoying!

Any ideas what this could be?

Tried a re-install
Unloaded all unnecessary process etc
Increased the buffer time
Set the bandwidth to max (on a LAN)

The PC is an AMD 2400 with 512mb memory

Thanks in advance

Coach