Frozen audio codec... perhaps.

Recently I've gotten a problem with my audio. I've got quite an extensive mp3 collection, which I created myself and got off the Internet. Starting about a few months ago, I was playing the songs on Winamp, when suddenly the music stopped.

The mp3 had frozen in the middle of playing. Pressing stop and replaying it, had no effect. So I closed Winamp down and restarted it. It wasn't Winamp, because then I couldn't get any mp3 to play at all. In fact, no sound played at all. None of the sound effects that were assigned to menus opening or errors occuring. Nothing.

I did Ctrl-Alt-Del to see what was frozen, but nothing appeared to be frozen. When I tried shutting windows down, it said the mp3 I was initially playing had frozen and asked me whether I wanted to shut it down. In fact, I could never get this message unless I tried restarting my computer.

So I attempted to defragmentised the hard disk. Problem solved. But then it happened again. So I tried iTunes. Happened again, except with iTunes when I close the program down, I can play the music again. I tried scanning the hard disk for viruses with Nortin, but nothing. So I switched to Kaspersky (because it was cheaper). Still nothing.

It makes me think it's an audio codec issue, but I'm not sure. I need a second opinion.

I'm currently running Windows 2000 version 5.00.2195 Service Pack 4. My audio codec is Avance AC97. Seeing as it happened with iTunes as well as Winamp, I doubt it's a Winamp issue (especially seeing as I reinstalled it three times).

Help would be greatly appreciated.