[any ANONYMOUS forum user]

I have similar problems: For some songs (about every second or third) the client needs to buffer several times (I usually then skip those) and has some glitches in it. It's like it's only playing a second, then pausing for a fraction of a section. It's like the effect of a stroboscope, if you know what I mean. The player doesn't SKIP the music, it just pauses for a very brief period of time which makes the music sound slower-
With the client I've set the buffer to 128K, which should be quite decent for a audio-stream.
At the beginning, I first thought it might have something to do with the popularity of the songs, so that less often played songs need to be buffered more, but there was no real correlation there after observing the stuff for a while.

With the webclient, however, it seems to run more smoothly. while writing this post, I am skipping through about 10 or 15 songs to provoke the same behavior as I observed it with the client, but the web-player does not seem to be affected. But, to be honest, I'd rather listen with the client than with the ad-infested browser. (btw: are those advertisers really so stupid, to show me Kaiser Chief-ads while I'm listening to liquid funk?)

And: I newly installed my Windows a few weeks ago and the last.fm client is the version as of yesterday, so everything should be up to date. No bandwidth-consuming apps in the background (except Trillian instant messenger, but that can't be it, and it's even running on a separate machine)

Generally I'd say, that there is more buffering than there was a few months ago, oh and because I just wrote otherwise: As of this minute, the webclient starts buffering like hell. I can't listen for more than 5 seconds straight.