Stuttering on new DVD drive...

After my 4 year old Creative drive (DVD6240E) drew its last breath i bought a LG8160b drive and found that all my movies were now stuttering.
I checked up on here and found that the LG8120's had problems with stuttering so i bought the drive that everybody seemed to be recommending - a Pioneer A106.
The thing is, I still have the stuttering - if anything its even worse.
Before when I was using the Creative drive it never stuttered once or had any breakup at all - after 2 minutes of watching R2 Blade 2 (straight from the wrapper) i thought i was watching a slideshow and the image was being corrupted as well.
I can't see that its a bottleneck with my system because surely i would have had that problem all along.
I've patched the drive so its region free - could that make a difference? (TBH there were problems before i patched it - they just seem worse now - although that could just be my imagination)
I've tried the disk and others on a bog standard tesco's player and it works like a dream - so it isn't the disk.

Anyone with any thoughts?

Cheers

Steve

1800xp
ATI 128 AIW
512 DDR
Nforce Mobo
SBLive

 

I forgot.....

The DVD is running as Secondary Slave (CDRW as Master) and Ultra DMA is enabled (Mode 4).
I'm using Zoomplayer, ATI DVD and Power DVD with the same problems across the board.

Cheers

Steve:

 

I don't know but maybe seting the dvd drive up as master would help


C

 

Cheers for replying - I was starting to wonder whether i had asked a really lame question

Sadly i've already tried running it as a master on the secondary, both with a CDRW connected as a slave and disconnected - still getting a really jerky picture with tearing (macroblocking?? - not sure if that is the correct term) - what i can't figure out is why some of it would be replicated when ripping it to my HDD.
The strange thing is that i've haven't changed any drivers, used any new programs or generally made any changes to my PC except for the new drives - and neither of them worked properly whereas the positively paleolithic Creative drive worked like a dream.
Got me stumped for sure!

Thanks for the answer anyway Comer

Steve