That sound like something completely different. I've noticed stalls when returning to gpsapp. I still have to put vmstat on my player to that I can check my theory. I'm guessing gpsapp is paged out because the player is trying to use all available memory so every memory access causes a pagefault and it takes a while before the gpsapp is considered more active than the player.
_________________________
40GB - serial #40104051 gpsapp