benn600, you seem to have a lot of processig going on after reading some of your previous posts
there's something I use that might be of interest to you
http://www.veridicus.com/tummy/programming/powermenu/it adds a context menu item to the program to control it's priority easily
I use it a lot for setting video encoding programs to 'idle' so the pc's much more useable while encoding is going on (a lot less bother than usein task manager)
pops and clicks are usually caused on playback by problems with the system bus (pci etc) being full or used incorrectly and not on the encoding side of the task
bad drivers, or heavy disk IO can cause this
possible problems\solutions are
lowering the priority of an encoding program to 'idle'
disk access - if your hard drive and dvd drive are on the same cable only one can be used at at a time by the pc
ripping onto the same drive as you are playing back from - when you need to read the next bit of music and the hard drive is busy writing to your ripped file there'll be a short delay that gives you a brief blank bit of audio
In your storage thread, you asked about if I raid'ed my drives, and this is why I don't
drive 2 can play music, drive 3 can receive the ripped dvd and drive 4 can be the source for an encode and drive 5 the target for the encode - end result, they can all work at the same time without interruption
If I raid my drives then none of that can happen -
all of my drives can do only one thing at a time
why doesn't video pop and click - easy
video playback doesn't uses MC's buffering system but it's own
it buffers a lot more than MC does
personally, I dont understand why MC ties it's buffering into it's playback engine - it just doesn't make any kind of sense to me, but I guess they have good reasons for it