Sansa m260 auto-pause problem

I have the Sandisk M250 but have not had any of those issues. But I know you were asking about the M260.

Very basic question, do you have the player "locked"? In other words, that little white slider bar on the bottom (says 'hold' on mine). I have found if I do not lock the player and have it in my pant pocket etc sometimes I will bump the somewhat sensitive pad and it will pause, jump ahead etc because (as you can guess) that is the part of the pad that I bumped.

make sure you lock the player if it is not just sitting idle on a desk or something. may be the issue.

I think this might have something to do with the playback settings. You may have noticed that when you press the "down" button while a song is playing, the player shuffles through 4 playback options: standard (no icon), A-B, repeat song, repeat all.

I had my player in random play mode, and I think I may have been in A-B, or maybe just standard. Because of the shuffle feature, perhaps the player was mistakenly getting to the "end" of the album before all of the songs were played. By placing the player in repeat all, you elliminate this problem, but you may hear the same song more than once before the player gets through all of the songs in the album- thus having to fastforward the song you already heard to get to the unheard ones.

Another option is to take the player out of shuffle mode and just listen to the album in order- mine hasn't paused in the middle doing this.
Hope this helps,
Jon