Of all these things, I'm aware. (sadly)

I've discovered (through VERY limiited testing) that my HD is the main cluprit. I have 2 75GXP drives in my system (1 has been replaced 2 times). I used to rip to them.. then encode. I changed to rip entirely to RAM and encode from there... this helped a little, but not nearly enough. I changed to EAC somewhere along the line (after the 'new and improved mmj' and audiograbber). This seemed to help, but I was back to using the HD as a storage medium.

My last attempt was to rip to my main OS drive (Quantum Ultra IV on a 39160 controller). From that drive I transfer the songs to the empeg before moving them to the 75GXP. This seems to work well. I've only 1 or 2 pops in the albums I rip.

My latest upgrade has been from an ASUS a7v333 w/xp2000 to a P4PE w/P4 2.4. I haven't ripped enough to really tell if the board might make a difference. I'll update when I have more experience with it.