I think I spoke to soon with my update yesterday saying that the latest release fixed all things for PR1.2

It's still not perfect and still stutters occasionally but nowhere near as much as it did before. My main gripes are that network activity such as Skype connections cause stuttering and any alerts such as email/sms cause the audio to complete divert to the messages so I miss whatever is being said for the time it takes for the phone to play the tune. On this issue, I did notice that the default N900 player now seems to set the phone into a mode where all alerts change to a very short and quiet beep, rather like the signal that you have a second caller trying to contact you in a voice call - plus at no point does it cause the audio file being played to be interrupted.

If the built-in player had better support for resuming, head-phone pause/resume and a decent slider I'd be back to it again.