Just updating the progress of this:

Right now I have installed two OS on my computer. After serveral days of trying several things, The conclusion has been to run a "dedicated" MM in an unofficial install of XP that is only 200 Megs. This seems to sortout all the problems really.

I also decided to enable network connections backon this PC since I can run audio without anything else going on in the other install, this is running the standard XP SP2 pro so that anything and everything needed will run.

Anyway, that was my solution, to run MM in it's own OS if I need it to playback flawlessly, such as for practicing Vocals or guitar or if I don't want the CPU doing anything else. That leads me to a new problem that will be discussed in a new thread.

This can be closed.

Hi - Check if something (driver usually) is keeping the computer occupied for too long using a program from http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Pete10

IE 8 opens an new iexplore.exe in the task manager for each tab started, i wonder if monkey is getting that to happen from IE by proxy.? that would explain a lot of the high cpu cycles and the high use of ram at start up of monkey.?

cont....

There was more changes, notably, Turning off tooltips might have been what stopped it.

So oddly enough, in the last few hours, this has stopped. Now I have to figure out why:

I opened and played some videos in WMP. Does this thing load some kind of driver/program that makes your sound card work better? or something?
Magic Nodes or MM was searching the nodes. I saw earlier some message in the corner about getting track info earlier that is gone now.
I'm very knowledgeable about computers, but it seems that once the computer is running from a startup it is slower, and subsequently the performance evens out after a couple hours. None of that makes much sense, but if true, what the hell is taking that long to run and shut down? No details are found in the taskmanager. Perhaps the hardware has to warm up or windows is secretly scanning whole drives to cache data? My PC doesn't have a virus.

No, I didn't shut off the DSP's. They are essential and as such, any workaround that includes ditching them is not feasible.

Anyway, sorry for the length. I'm curious as to why MM specifically is causing skipping and dropouts of the audio. Maybe someone can shed some light on what causes this in the first place, and ideally dispell any non-sense posted above or confirm it.

One more question. Can I assume MM causes explorer.exe to need more resources, even If I have four "no nodes" views in the tree?
Thanks to anyone that replies. Maybe we can figure this thing out.

Earlier today, I had this problem that couldn't really be fixed.

It seems that something is happening that makes the buffer gradually go down to 0% resulting in a the song hanging on playback. It isn't that the buffer isn't able to catch up so it eventually goes to 0%, it actually sits at around 95-99% until it starts dropping about 10% per half-second for sme unknown reason. The only solution seemed to be to pause. wait about 5 seconds, then unpause, though this would happen after about 2 minutes of playback so it kinda had to be done at least twice a song.

I am using the FX_Burst output plugin, but I doubt that it is the problem because no such problem existed in winamp using it. This is how I can see the buffer's progress.

Here's everything I modified through windows, mediamonkey and my plugins and nothing seemed to work, and I mean they had zero effect:

Enabled disk caching on my external HD that all files are kept in
Removed the page file from the external HD, re-enabled it later
Closing MM windows such as artwork, playlist, didn't do anything
Changed the output setting from 24-bit to 20-bit to 16-bit, none of which stopped this behaviour
Turned off various plugin options to reduce processing consumption
edited MSconfig.exe and removed the options for "conservative swap file" and "video bus throttle", removed some more services while I was there.
Changed processor to optimize for background services