My audio player of choice is usually foobar2000, but I do like iTunes as well. It integrates a lot of different features, particularly a radio directory, and podcast facilities, that I find quite useful. It’s also pretty. 
However, I found that iTunes skips (playing a podcast or radio stream) when I did something else on the computer that incurred non-trivial hard disk activity. A quick search on Google found me the blog entry How to make iTunes for Windows stop skipping, but I don’t think it’s a satisfactory solution. Setting the output device to waveOut causes mixing problems (an artificial example is playing iTunes and watching a DVD) – IIRC it prevents mixing entirely, although fact searching that seems to say it’s merely prone to problems.
At any rate, I seem to have fixed my problem by following the same approximate steps (Control Panel, QuickTime, Sound Out), but using Options to increase the buffer size from the default 120ms to 1200ms, instead of changing the output device away from DirectSound. Makes sense in a way, although I’m not sure why a radio stream would be affected by hard disk activity.
