I have a 16 Meg player. I've tried playing WAV files with skip using the 2.0b3 developer kernel when I got the terrible skipping. I installed one of mlord's kernels, and I just tried out WAV files and it seems to behave better.

When the playlist has 1 WAV song in it, it seems to play it fine. I've brought up the "vital signs" screen and the free memory is around 490k, dipping to as low as 100k. Free memory doesn't seem to be as much of an issue. The skipping doesn't happen every time now, but here's the way to duplicate it:

open up a playlist with a CD's worth of wavs. (i don't know if this has any relevance but this is what I'm doing). Then when the song is playing, briefly fast forward for 1/2 second and let it continue. This causes the disk to spin up, apparantly the empeg is reading ahead/caching the song and the whole time it is skipping very badly, making popping noises, pausing, etc etc. Really terrible. I don't know what i did before the mlord kernel, but it would skip badly no matter what i did.

Calvin