Something that I found that helped me out tons on this issue is, using Pete's CDR ASPI/IOCTL Driver 1.7 for cdrom... then setting caching mode to : Async........ while I dont know if your cdrom will support it, I noticed by default that the caching mode on most of the other plug-in's are set to play it safe.... even the Pete's plugin is set by default at less than that... Mine still skips a tiny bit, but it is NOWHERE near as bad as it once was when I first starting dabbling with EPSXE......
Hope this helps some
Hope this helps some