Itunes music slows down randomly during play

Question

First, my system specs.
CPU- AMD Phenom 9850 Quad @ 2.51ghz
RAM- 2GB Adata ddr2 800
GFX- ATI 4870 Radeon pci-e 500MB
SFX- Creative X-Fi Sound card
HDD- 80Gb, 250Gb, 500Gb, all sata2. (the 500 has all my music files)
OS - Windows XP SP3 (It was doing the same thing in SP2)
Itunes version 9.0.2.25 (version upgrade didn't fix)
I have gone through and upgraded all the device drivers to be recent (in december). I've been dealing with this problem for a little over 8 months now that I can remember, and the driver upgrade didn't seem to help.
Now the problem is that itunes is what I use to listen to music since it syncs with my ipod. But, this only happens in itunes (and recently on my ipod) not in windows media player or in winamp (or media player classic if I just play one song).
It happens randomly. Some songs will play without a hitch a dozen times without a problem. Then I'll come back the next day and the song I was listening to the other day will slow down in the middle of the song. At first I thought it was distorted, but after it happened once or twice, I figured out that the song itself slows down dramatically so that the pitch is dramatically lowered. So much so that certain higher pitched long notes will sound like one long awful bass note. This will continue for a few seconds (it varies. Anywhere from one second to several seconds, up to at one point 10 seconds.)
Sometimes moving the song backwards by clicking on the progress bar will fix it. This hasn't always worked though. Some songs seem to stay distorted and only fix themselves randomly. This is especially true on the ipod, where it seems a slowed-down song stays that way indefinitely. Admittedly I don't listen to the ipod as much so I may be off on that since it happens so infrequently. Though there are songs that play slowed down every time on the ipod (there is a messhugga song that keeps doing it only on the ipod for instance).
It should be noted I don't run anything in the backround of windows. Here is a list of my task manager while running itunes.
system idle proccess
system
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
svchost.exe
spoolsv.exe
smss.exe
services.exe
lsass.exe
explorer.exe
csrss.exe
winlogon.exe
wscntfy.exe
itunes.exe
Processes: 18
I do run a game pretty often (and listen to itunes as a backround) and I do browse the internet using firefox, so add to that list WAR.EXE and firefox.exe. Whether these are up or not does not seem to matter. The songs slow down with them up and with them closed.
My 500GB HDD has 60GB of space left on it, but erasing/cleaning up the disk or defragmenting it hasn't seemed to help. My itunes library has 55.90 (8940 songs) in it. Cleaning up the library and removing excess duplicates didn't seem to fix the problem. I did move the library from the 500 to the 250, but moved it back when the same thing happened after a few days of playing music.
My RAM doesn't max out, though 2GB is a bit low these days. The WAR.EXE process uses .800-1.4gb (800,000-1,400,000k) of RAM, and the rest of the processes seem to keep well under .400gb max total. itunes stays around ~.064gb (64,984k). And remember, firefox, warhammer online, and the rest running at the same time doesn't automatically cause the slow down. And it slows down whether they are both up or neither are randomly (I listen to itunes sometimes for long periods while reading or painting). I also replaced my RAM fairly recently (other stuff went bad) but the same problem persists.
Lastly, this has happened on my ipod. The problem is that it seems permanent on the ipod, whereas the itunes on my pc will correct itself (seemingly) the ipod version will not correct itself until I sync the ipod.
I have completely removed itunes twice (as well as gotten rid of the registry entries and loose ends using CCleaner). I have deleted the itunes libraries and let itunes create brand new ones. I have upgraded to the most (at the time) recent version of itunes. The problem persists
I may be missing something. I hate using winamp and windows media player, so I haven't just stopped using itunes. But the real problem is that it is so random it's nearly impossible to test. I've tried several different methods of fixing this without tearing down itunes and re-coding it And every time, I THINK I've fixed it only to have it happen again within a week. Hence why this has been a problem for well over 8 months now. It's a small enough issue that I'm still listening to music without loads of problems, but it is a persistent, if infrequent, annoyance.
ANY help you guys can offer me would be greatly appreciated, though I'm not holding my breath since the problem is so weird. But I am willing to try anything if it might work. I can only try them out till they don't work, right?
Thanks ahead of time.
Message was edited by: Rannonzero

Answer 1

I'm sorry to hear about your ipod, I'm also having the same trouble but my is been going on for like a day or two. I have a nano 5th generation but all of the sudden it reseted itself it turn itself off then apple logo appeared and after that it was playing the songs like it should, mine was the same as you I'll be playing a very fast song and then it'll slow it down it was frustraded I hope this will help you. good luck to you and to me too because I only hope that I won't have the same problem later on.