Video pauses and audio skips

While watching any video in iTunes, the video will freeze and the audio will skip rapidly like a broken record for 5-10 seconds, the video will then speed forward and finally resume at normal speed but with the audio out of sync. Sometimes this happens only once, but it usually occurs a few times in one viewing. The audio will sync back up witht the video if I manually skip forward or backwards, but it's ridiculously annoying and I shouldn't have to put up with this since I have to update this stupid program five times a month. When the audio skips, it does something like this: if the character is saying "attack", the audio will skip and all I'll hear is "attaattaattaattaattaattaattaattaattaattaattaattaatta". Does that make sense? I hope so. Thanks for anyone's input.