I get frustrated and push the buttons zillions of times, then the HU will catch up to all of my playing around and cycle right past what I was hoping to accomplish.

I can think of a few things that might cause this:

- Running an old version of the player software where this is a known bug (but you say it's 2.0 final so that's not it).

- Running third-party programs which are grabbing CPU time. Are you running any? If so, can you disable them?

- Hard disk trouble, and the pause is the hard disk trying to spin up and locate a file but it's having to do re-tries. Have you been noticing symptoms of hard disk trouble lately?