iTunes stops and starts over Airport express!!!Q

I'm not sure when this started happening to me but it's getting progressively worse.
Bad enough that I turned off the AE wireless and hardwired it to my network. Now the only wireless connection is between my AEX and my Macbook (using 802.1n).
This did in fact seem to help greatly - but not perfect.

The ultimate test would be to hardwire another Mac and just control it remotely, thus there would be Ethernet directly to the stereo. At least this would tell us if it's just a bad wireless connection causing the problem.
I'm guessing that the AE has a very small stream buffer. Thus if the UDP connection takes a hit the buffer runs dry before it reconnects - and/or we see the error message.
Another possible problem 'could' be the song bit rate. I doubt that iTunes down samples the bit stream on the fly (have no idea how to check this). Could it be that higher bit rates are simply more susceptible to interrupted network traffic? Stream buffers would fill - and empty faster...

*I have also noticed that our Microwave can sometimes waste my wireless iTunes connection - but internet stays connected but slowed - which is TCP (error controlled) traffic.

I also had a strange problem the other day. The connection was dropping constantly with the infamous -3256 error.
I reset the AE (unplugged it for a bit) and when it fired up the music was suddenly at a higher volume. I'm not sure what this signifies but I'd point all the problems at the AE. Either bad design, bad buffer size or bad firmware.
Note that I haven't had a dropped connection for 2 days since the AE reset.

Anyway, right or wrong this was my two cents worth. It would be nice if an Apple rep could confirm or at least acknowledge the problem and possible causes.

Well, just wanted to support this thread...

Got the same problem, I use the "multiple speakers-fix" as a get-around.

This just has to get solved, you just don't buy an Airport Express to experience that one of the main features doesn't work properly. Not good for the Mac marketing-strategy I guess...

This problem's been around on my network for a couple of years. Didn't matter if I was using my G3 Pismo laptop or my Dual 2GHz G5 or an Intel iMac...

I always attributed the issue to the wireless network, which in my case is an Airport Extreme, two Express, and AppleTV, and 5 Macs. I have a separate wireless network in my home just for guests and their Windows boxes.

In the past, a cold restart (full power off) of the base stations solved the problems.

My working hypothesis is some type of flow control is kicking in, but I've not been able to pin this down. To back that up, lots of folks report the same symptom I see where iTunes "pauses" if there's only one speaker set turned on. And the Network Utility doesn't report any Send Errors during dropouts. I tinkered with logging for a bit, but that's a nuisance since I use DHCP. I hadn't had dropouts for a month or so and I don't know which host has the logs now.

Today's problem seems fixed with a power cycle of the Airport Extreme base station, FWIW...

Supporting the thread:
we have a two-moth-old mac book pro, and an airport express with an airport base station. The express really is just so the music connection is wireless and the laptop doesn't become an expensive music player.
It seems to stop working more with streaming radio than when I play songs from my song list. I'm trying the multi speakers right now and hopefully that will solve the problem, but when I started to download a song, it killed it. The solutions is to unplug the express, plug it back in and then it works again. Seems silly... coming from apple... they usually make better solutions than that. Slightly disappointed in this solution.