Quote Originally Posted by roadrunner
I will 'play' with the buffers, but WTF@!...2 different pc's with default installs? No one else is having this problem?
The only problem that I have ever had with XMMS is not it's fault it's the artsd daemon interfering with the output and this has happened on every distribution I have tried.

Last common element - using alsa sound - but home is via and office is i845 chipset - no soundcard in either. I have an old soundblaster that I might plug in for testing this.
XMMS worked fine with alsa also and if you put the soundblaster in you should install sndconfig version .69 not the .70 I have read posts in Debian User that the .70 is broken you will most likley need it to set up the sound configuration.
this raises another noob question: since everything is already installed on my hd - if I install new hardware like a sound card, does the startup script detect this as micro-mini-soft does with their pnp environments?
You should install discover and hwdata to have automatic detection of new hardware.