xmms-dropouts

When listening to xmms while reading my mail xmms will dropout during the delete of a message (also while saving a bookmark in konq). I think this may be happening during other disk activity as well but I haven't explored this yet. ( I just spent a few minutes exploring this and it definitely seems to be disk access related ) I tried decreasing xmms nice value (giving it higher priority) to -4 but that didn't help. I'd appreciate ideas as this is very distracting. Suse 8.1 pro, kde 3.05 (although I've noticed the problem on other versions of suse and kde as well). I've got a brand new machine w/ athlon xp2000+, 512 mb memory and 2 seagate barracudaIV 80gb drives so I don't believe that computing puwer is to blame. thanks dh