Welll thanks for your help, unfortunately trying what you told me still didn't cure the problem - but on saturday night after scouring the net for people who had similiar problems to me , I discovered a miracle cure......WinDV.

It is a very small free program that has cured all my glitches, something to do with more memory buffering for capturing and saving back to tape.

I can definately recommend Win DV if you are having any audio dropout or any glitches. It has worked for me and I will be sending a donation to the creator who has made me a happy man after 18 months of frustration.