I would tend to agree, this is beginning to sound like a dodgy cable. However, I have seen similar behaviour on a player with a known good cable that worked fine on V2 final, and then started to do this after upgrade to V3A3. I suspect that for now, the only way to test, is to FIRST attempt a downgrade to V2.00 for a few days of continuous use (at least) and see if it still happens. If it does, then it's cable. If it doesn't re-occur, then it's the "A3 Stutter" problem.

Don't forget there was a similar problem in ( I think) V2B10/11, which was fixed in B13. Rob's major warning at Amersfoort 2002 was that the release could have problems in it that had been fixed in 2B13 but had not been ported across to the V3 tree for the player - hence problems you thought had already been fixed, may in fact re-occur. Be wary of this - maybe this is the case with this problem.