I am trying to finish up a CD and am having some major problems with stuttering and gapping as well as inconsistencies within the program itself. For example, sometimes the keyboard commands work (play, etc.), sometimes I have to use the mouse/screen to get them to function. I cannot get a full take without the stuttering, sometimes severe, which ususally screws everything up after the stutter, timing wise. I have 15-25 tracks going and have reduced them down to 5-6, w/ no plugins, in a new .veg file, with the idea of copying them back into the main file, to see if I can get some takes without the stuttering, no luck. Even with the bare minimum number of tracks it stutters. I have also done a clean media pool sweep to get rid of the unused files. One thing that is probably not making things any easier on the computer is I have a lot of volume envelope edites from comping tracks and overall track volume adjustments. The stutters usually, but not always, seem to happen around the volume envelope edit points, as best as I can tell. Some files have more problems than others, with roughly the same track count.

Here is my set up:

Dell Dimension XPS R400 (P II 400)
384 MB RAM (Crucial, just upgbraded from 128, with no apparent improvement)
2 Maxtor 7,200 rpm hard drives
1 - 20 GB for OS and applications (c:)
1 - 30 GB for audio only (d:)
2 Yamaha CDRW
1 - CRW 8424 EZ (use only as CD ROM)
1 - CRW 3200 EZ (use for burning)
Motherboard is unknown (Dell can not even tell me)
Delta 1010 Sound Card
ATI All-In-Wonder 128 - 16 MB Video Card

I ran .dskbench on the drives and found out my d: drive had some poor numbers, so I have ordered one of the new Maxtor D740X 40 GB hard drives. It is ATA 133, but I understand it will "dumb down" to ATA 33, which is what my MOBO has. I also re-tweaked my computer as follows:

Disabled Write Behind Caching
Reduced Read Ahead Optimization to none
Reduced Graphics Acceleration to the next to the lowest setting
Turned off Auto Insert Notification
Adjusted VCACHE to 16,000 (min/max)
Adjusted Virtual Memory to 256 (min/max) after defragging

It seems to me that there may be something going on besides an under achieving hard drive, that is why I am wondering if I should reinstall Vegas. I have downloaded Vegas 3.0c, but have not installed it yet.

Any ideas on what to do?

Thanks for any help.
Tim T