Help! Sony bdu-x10s stuttering

[sidius]

First off...my pc

My pc:
Intel e6750 dual core 2.66ghz
2gb of 866 ddr2 gskill ram,
nvidia 8800gt
abit ip35-e mobo
western digital 120gb (sad i know) 16mb hard drive
sony bdu-x10s blu-ray player
windows home xp with service pack 2
Westinghouse 24" hdmi 1080p lcd

I recently purchased a Sony bdu-x10s blu-ray drive. I have had OFF and ON stuttering problems with seemingly no correlation. I use WinDVD9 Plus Blu-ray and PowerDVD7.3 (not upgraded). The stuttering is present in both players.

When I first installed the drive, I thought i'd check to see how playback was before downloading new firmware and gpu drivers. It was horribly choppy. I downloaded new drive firmware from Sony and downloaded newest Nvidia drivers for my geforce 8800gt. After this, the drive ran silky smooth for hours and played Spiderwick Chronicles and National Treasure 2 with no problems on both software players.

And then...the very next day with no changes made to my pc, it starts stuttering every few seconds every single time I try and play either of the same blu-rays (stutters on both windvd and powerdvd). I uninstalled every other program I had on windows to try and minimize potential software clashes. Once my hard drive was down to the bare essential programs (sp2, windvd9, powerdvd 8) it started running smooth again for a long time.
Because of this, I assumed it was software/driver issues complicating playback and reformatted, installed fresh win xp home, updated it to sp2, downloaded all fresh drivers (drive firmware, gpu drivers, mobo drivers) and reinstalled windvd 9 plus bluray. It ran amazing again for a couple of days. As soon as I started adding in my essential software like spybot, itunes, dvd43 it started stuttering again. This is amazingly frustrating...

Nvidia control panel showed my cpu at 10-15% load throughout both smooth and stuttered playback. It stays constant. I have tried changing as many settings as possible with the bluray software players and they seem to have no effect (yes I have had the hardware decode turned on as well as off).

Also, I worried that my DVD43 might be clashing with it so I uninstalled it and saw zero benefits. I downloaded AnyDVD instead with no benefits. I unistalled anydvd and no benefits.

If I keep a bareboned system with no software whatsover I might be ok, but not quite willing to go that route.

Thanks again