Are you connecting to the player via the USB port?

There are known issues with USB on Windows XP, and no, they haven't been solved yet.

If you can reliably reproduce the USB-on-XP bugs, you might want to talk to [email protected] and offer to help them debug the problem. They're having trouble narrowing it down, and every time they tell somebody that Ethernet works fine on XP, they never get a call back (as the user switches to ethernet and the problems go away).