Momentary degraded playback when using wheel, center button

Question

Within the last month or so, I have noticed a degradation of playback quality when I use the wheel or the center button. What I mean by degradation is that the playback will "stutter" a bit (up to a second), as if the iPod doesn't have the memory to handle it all. Perhaps another good word to describe this is "garbled." Sometimes it's worse than others.
For example, if I use the button during playback to change the song's rating. Another example: when the iPod transitions to show the time after the screen has gone dark for a minute, there is also degradation. A final example: when I'm running and using the stopwatch, when I use the lap function, there is often stuttering a few seconds later (i.e., when the screen does dark.
It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens often enough to be annoying...perhaps 25% of the time I use the button and/or click wheel.
I've had the iPod for about 7 months. I'm not certain, but I don't think it happened until the most recent iPod software update.
Anyone else experiencing this?
Any advice?

Answer 1

Hey, great news. After posting my last post, I reinstalled iTunes. I had actually uninstalled it a while back, and was using the iPod as it was for a little over a month.
So after I reinstalled itunes, I synched my ipod to it and put a couple new songs on my ipod. After the sync was completed, I started listening and there wasn't any more scratching/ skipping noise +at all+, even when I repeatedly tapped the wheel to test it. And +it was horrible+ before. I couldn't even listen to music and use the Cover Flow option at the same time. Now, it's back to the way it was before it started skipping. yay
I think the problem might have been that faulty software update that we did. And reinstalling Itunes will give you the correct version of the software. So my guess is that if you haven't tried *uninstalling and reinstalling itunes* yet, it might work for you too. : ]
Message was edited by: coffeelips