Windows Media Player random stuttering

For almost every song, my Windows Media Player has a short stutter/lag during song playback. Sound quality is normal and there is no static or any other sort of issue. Only the really random, brief stutter, as if someone hit pause extremely quickly.

My setup is pretty much default...drivers are SigmaTel High Definition Audio Codec (Windows auto-configured this itself). I have a Dell Vostro 1500.

I have a K-Lite Codec Pack installed, but I believe this only affects my video codecs (.mkv/.avi/.divx, etc.).

Is it possible that the desktop background slideshow can be causing this? I have it on cycle every 5 minutes, which does somewhat match my windows media player stutter timing. I checked this though, and the stutter doesn't quite always happen with the change of background. My other concern was maybe my anti-virus problem (Symantec Endpoint) could be causing this.

Does anyone else have this problem? Any ideas on what could be causing this stutter? I did not have this issue back with Windows XP.

Did you try another player - e.g. VLC ( Download VLC Media Player 1.0.2 - FileHippo.com ). If that works, then you might have a codec problem indeed.

I think I might have figured out the problem.

My hard drive has 2 partitions, the default C:\ which is my Windows 7 and a storage partition D:\. I usually put all my music, video, photos, etc in the D:\ partition so in case something happens, all my data is still saved.

It might be stuttering because WMP has to retrieve the media files from my D:\ partition, while Windows 7 is on C:\. Maybe some sort of hard drive usage is causing this.

When playing some audio files from the C:\ there is noticeably less stuttering...but there still is stuttering. I will try a new set of codecs to see if that fixes the problem.

Oh, and does WMP auto index its library? I was reading an earlier thread:
Audio/Video Stutter/Hesitation

And was he referring to disabling Windows indexing? Or just WMP indexing? I do have quite a lot of music so maybe WMP is busy doing whatever it needs to do. It has been quite some time though, so i figured WMP would be done.