Audio sounds as though it's skipping

[Lloyd Te Kani]

Have recently revived my laptop after it had crashed, changed from Vista back to XP, re-loaded Hoster and am currently in the process of downloading some 5000 songs into my hard drive.

My problem now is that when I play back a song it sounds as if the audio is skipping quite badly. The songs start off but there is an intermittent staccato noise and the audio slows noticeably and the lyrics are quite badly out of sync. It's as if there's a dirty disk in the player but this is not the case. There is no disk in the CD drive at all. This problem is occurring after the song has been downloaded.

Assistance would be appreciated guys.

Lloyd T