Movies playing in HUD cause game to pause

Hey everyone. I have a problem that’s driving me crazy. Whenever a in-game event happens that calls a video to display on the HUD(Jaff’s, distress call, ect.) the game pauses for 30 seconds, or longer, before playing the movie and sound. It does not crash just pauses. Speed throughout the rest of the game is smooth. As you can imagine this is very frustrating with the game pausing every few seconds! I’ve tried the suggestions in the game faq’s, but no luck. I’ve defragged my HD. What’s really annoying is that this did not happen at first, and I can’t figure out what changed. Any ideas?

thanks.