I run 8.6 as well.

I don't know about the list thing, but I can speak to the cut out part. It has been my experience that about 1 in 3 files (or more sometimes) have problems. Whoever encoded set the bitrate wrong, clipped off the peaks, cut the end of the song off, put a bloop in the middle, or whatever.

I am on dial up so I find it very frustrating to download a 9 meg tune at 192 bit rate looking for some level of quality and find out some idiot chopped off the last 10 seconds of the song when they made the file.

Nothing you can do about it. Just trash the ones that don't work and keep looking.

The other thing is what are you playing the tunes on? Quicktime will absolutely cut out when resources get taxed and it is very annoying. Other players will not cut out. SoundJam MP won't for example. I don't know about iTunes- I don't run it.