iPhone playback - skipping/blank spots

Hi folks, I have a horrible feeling that my iPhone (the iPod element, at least) may be suffering some form of 'terminal' issue but I'm hoping someone may be able to prove me wrong.

I've had the phone for 14 months, running fine and using the iPod on a regular basis - but in the last 2 weeks I've encountered what I can best describe as 'glitches' in the audio playback.

These glitches involve either:

(1) The sound suddenly cutting out, but the time bar continues to progress and the sound will then come back in later in the track.

or

(2) The sound 'skips' and jumps forward several times in quick succession - like someone using the FF button on a CD - this will happen a few times, then playback will be fine.


In both cases the following should be noted:

- If I skip back to the start of the track the same result happens at the same point each time
- The corresponding tracks play without a problem in iTunes on my PC, and if loaded onto my Shuffle or old Classic
- This happens both on tracks burned from my own CD collection, and on podcasts/tracks downloaded from iTunes
- If I clear my phone's audio content, then resync it with a bunch of stuff including the same track, then that track will be ok, but otehrs may experience issues.

All of this leads me to believe that there's some sort of hardware issue (best comparison I can think of is damaged blocks/sectors on a hard drive?)

Other interesting/relevant(?) notes:

- On one occasion album artwork for the track in question was also corrupted (artwork appeared to be made up of two different artwork files, 'tiled' in quarters)
- The issue began not long after I upgraded (clean install) from Win XP to Win 7 on my PC, but I suspect this is coincidence. The music library is stored on a separate drive, and was not touched during the process.
- I have carried out a full factory reset and backup restore on the phone since encountering the issue


So, does anyone have any rays of hope for me in resolving this, or am I looking at mothballing the iPod function on my phone until/unless I can replace it?

Message was edited by: flipsix3