HTPC Woes

[Demi9OD]

I've put together a HTPC in my living room for doing TV Tuning / DVD Playback / Divx playback, and no matter what I do, DVDs chop and frame/audio lag.

System Specs
Asus A7N 266 (nForce1)
AMD Athlon 1700XP
512mb Crucial DDR
ATI All in Wonder 7500
SB Live 5.1
Toshiba 5002 2X DVD-R
Seagate 40GB HD as Primary
Western Digital 120GB as Secondary

I am partial to Windows 2000(sp4), so that was my first install.

Order of software installation:
DirectX9
Newest nForce drivers
Newest ATI Catalyst drivers
SB Live Unified Driver Pack
SV Live Web Driver update
Power DVD
Newest Power DVD Patch

All DVDs pause and stutter on playback, tried imaging DVD with DVD Decryptor -> ISO, mounted in Daemon tools, same thing. Tried playing back with Media Player Classic, same thing. UDMA enabled and working on both hard drive and DVD drive.

I gave up on Win2K and tried XP instead. Same install procedure except I left on built in ATI AIW drivers instead of installing newest Cat's. Same thing.

I am running an intensive memory test now. Just as some background I've been doing hardware and Windows support for about 9 years, so I've probably tried most of the obvious things. The only thing I can think of now is some sort of hardware incompatibility, and honestly if I can't figure this crap out in the next day or two I'm dumping the AMD setup for a Shuttle with an Intel chipset and p4 in it.

If you guys have ANY suggestions toss em at me, I'd hate to spend another 400-500 on hardware if I could get this system which is otherwise perfectly stable and solid working (I've let the TV Tuner run for about a month streight without rebooting, 0 problems).

[Demi9OD]

I believe I fixed it on my own. Like usual Creative was to blame. I dissabled the Live 5.1 in the device manager and couldn't notice any chopping on DVDs, although the sound pause when frame lagged was always easier too hear than to see. I enabled the onboard nforce audio, dug out the SPDIF header in my pile of old computer crap, and connected it to my reciever with the optical cable. Everything SEEMS to be working ok, reciever is picking up DD 5.1 and DTS encoding without a hitch. Sometimes just writing everything down can help you organize your thoughts and figure out the problem, thanks :)