That's not quite what Tony's on about. You don't need to be listening to a CD to get the hiccups.

If you've got an old (and/or crap) CD-ROM drive, it doesn't provide media-insertion events to Windows. This means that, in order to implement AutoPlay, Windows needs to poll the CD-ROM drive periodically. Typically, this is done every 5 seconds.

Now, the crappy CD-ROM drive takes a while to decide whether there's a different CD in there, and also decides to lock down the IDE bus while handling the command. This means that nothing can happen for a fraction of a second, every five seconds.

You won't usually notice, but when playing music, you need reasonable throughput -- hiccups result.

This might not be the problem, but it's worth checking out.