This may be completely irrelevant to your situation, but since upgrading to WinXP sp2 I've found that my ASUS DVD-ROM used for audio and DVD playback (E616-P2 or some such serial no., latest firmware etc.) will sometimes skip and jump on audio playback, about once a second. However, this only happens if I've brought the machine out of hibernation or standby, and even then it only occurs infrequently. A reboot fixes all.

Device has been uninstalled and reinstalled in device manager etc. but I suspect there's something not right about the way hibernation and standby are causing the drive to sleep and re-awake.

Does your laptop drive work OK on a clean boot, or does your problem only occur after standby or suspend?

General specs: Tyan Trinity i845E, Intel P4 2.4 Ghz 533 Mhz FSP, 512 Mb PC2100 RAM, 2x Seagate 160 Gb HDD, Promise Ultra100TX2 controller (HDDs are connected to this; optical drives are on mainboard IDE controllers), Asus DVD-ROM E616-P2, Pioneer DVR-108XL...