Poor iTunes Playback Quality (Stuttering/Scratching)

Hi everyone,
I've been using iTunes for a long time (a couple years I think), and I just started having this problem. Basically, sometimes (not always) the quality of the sound of the songs that I am listening to will suddenly become horrible. It'll stutter and have weird, static-like noises in the background, and although the song will be discernible, it's not really a lot of fun to listen to.
The songs I've been listening to lately that have had this problem all used to work properly (a couple days ago), but then all of a sudden yesterday this started happening. I think that all of the songs on my computer are susceptible, and I have had problems with listening to music in other, non-Apple products that I have tried briefly, too (e.g., WinAMP.) And of course, even if it was just iTunes, I prefer it over other music programs , so I would hate to have to switch either way.
I notice one thing that makes the problem much worse is if I open Windows Media player.
I also have one other idea about what could have caused it...I program in C++ somewhat often (I'm a computer science major in college), and I had one program that I was working on that had a lot of null pointer errors and other such problems relating to pointers...could it be that I have somehow messed up (or failed to deallocate) some of the memory of my computer and that it doesn't have the resources to run iTunes? (A lot of other things on my computer have seemed to be running more slowly...could it be a virus? I have anti-virus software....)
Oh, also, I did read through all the articles I could find on this subject in the help database. I upgraded to the latest version of iTunes and QuickTime, and changed the QuickTime settings to waveOut only. I also restarted my computer a few times since the problem started, ran SpyBot Search and Destroy, and tried to update my drivers (although I couldn't figure out how to do that, the instructions provided on the site didn't seem to work.)
Anyway, I'm stumped. Any help anyone can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
--Phil
Toshiba Windows XP 3.33 GHz processor

Ok, thanks for the suggestion...I actually read what you wrote to another poster and started running an ewido scan about half an hour ago, haha. It's still running actually...about 2/3 of the way done.
And yes I've seen that article, and I tried everything there except for the drivers stuff.
So far it has found about 273 things on my computer, which is interesting because I had just run SpyBot. I guess ewido covers some territory that SpyBot does not eh? Thanks for the tip, I'll have to add ewido to my arsenal of virus-fighting software .
Thanks for all the help, I'll post again after the scan is finished if I have more problems.
--Phil

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Poor iTunes Playback Quality (Stuttering/Scratching)

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