Minor Problems with A Lot of Games...

I have been desperately trying to get ePSXe to emulate my games perfectly, but it hasn't happened. For the most part, every game I have tried runs quite well, but there's always a small glitch or something that is really annoyning.

For example,

FF7 - Music, when in towns or areas not on the world map, slows down when you first enter the area, but then returns to normal. Same thing when entering battles

FF8 - Movies have a brief pause/skip every few seconds

Xenogears - Movies have a brief pause/skip every few seconds

MGS - Cutscenes and menus have a brief pause/skip in sound every few seconds

Gauntlet Legends - Sound skips/pauses every couple of seconds

Castlevania:SOTN - Sound skpis/pauses every few seconds


As you can see, almost all the issues are with the sound pausing/skipping/poping. I can deal with them if I absolutely have to, but I'd like to fix the issues if possible.

Any idea what I can do to fix this?


Comp Specs
------------
Intel Pentium 3 3.0 gHz
1024mb RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb
SoundMAX Digital Audio (it's integrated on my MB but is actually pretty good)


ePSXe Settings:

Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.75
-------------------------
Fullscreen 1280x1024
16 bit

Quality - R8B8B8A8
Filtering - 0
High-Res Textures - 2

Use FPS Limit - Autodetect

Offscreen Drawing - 3
Framebuffer Textures - 2
Framebuffer Access - 3

Alpha/Mask/Blending - On


Eternal SPU Plugin 1.41
----------------------
Device - DirectSound
Buffer - 25

Audio Out - Thread

Wait for XA Buffer - On



Any help is greatly appreciated. I was using ePSXe 1.6 and and now using 1.5.2, which seems to be working quite a bit better (since now all I have is sound problems when before I had some graphics problems too).