MUSIC RARELY PLAYS RIGHT THE FIRST TIME

I've been having the same problem with practically every RPG Maker game I purchased and played through Steam: the first time a piece of music loads, there's a 90% chance it won't play correctly. I haven't noticed any real problems with games downloaded here (yet), but that may just have been luck.

The music will play for a few seconds and then skip back and start over again. It'll make some progress eventually (five steps forward, four steps back), but while the music is acting up, the game won't play properly. It'll only respond for 1-2 seconds every 5-10 seconds, rendering the game unplayable.

I have found some "fixes":
1. Let the music run its course. Once it starts looping properly it'll be okay. though this make take over 10 minutes for something that's less than a minute long. So... yeah.
2. Exit the area or restart the game. When my laptop reloads the music, it'll usually play just fine.

There's a similar problem with sound effects. These take 3-5 seconds to load and the game won't respond to anything in the meantime, but as long as they're short, they'll play fine.

I haven't always had this problem. It seems to have started a year ago or so. It's hard to pinpoint.

I've already played around with the drivers of my graphics and sound card, testing various older versions and so on, but that made no difference. I also know it's not a matter of my laptop being too shitty, cuz, you know, RPG Maker. Sure, I've got stuff like a Intel Graphics 3000 HD 3000 in there, but that should be more than enough.

So, uh, anyone know what's going on?

I'm playing directly from the hard drive.

Oh, and probably also worth noting: once the music had loaded once, I'm probably good for the rest of the day. However, when I turn my laptop off at night, I'm likely to encounter the problems all over again.