iTunes slows up XP system in between songs

Hi,

I have Win XP Pro SP2, 1Gb RAM and the latest iTunes. When iTunes finishes a song, my whole system slows up for several seconds, whatever else I am doing - if I'm doing nothing except listening, the next song just takes a few seconds extra to play. It makes no difference whether I have shuffle on or off. Worse - if I enable Cross Fade then I get a terrible break up of both songs for the whole cross fade duration and several seconds into the next song. This has always been the case even in previous versions of iTunes. Any ideas please?


Thanks,
Nick