Thanks ua549 and MrDigital.

As I hinted at the end of my last post, I'm leaning towards a hardware issue as well.

I'll try the "turn everything off and see if it persists" option.

My mother won't have any music for a few days, but she can't really hear too much music right now since the Media Player starts to stutter halfway through the songs, so she'd rather wait and see if this gets fixed, I'm sure.

I'll report in a few days... thanks again.