While searching for the culprit that is responsible for the AirTunes cut-outs, I thought it might be a good idea to try disabling Spotlight and Dashboard.

Two steps are necessary, first turn Spotlight off in the hostconfig file, then disable indexing and remove the existing indexes with mdutil:

> sudo vi /etc/hostconfig
vi> Go
SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
vi> ZZ
> sudo mdutil -i off /
> sudo mdutil -E /

You can then use Activity Monitor to kill any mds or mdimport processes or else just reboot.

If you later change your mind and decide you want Spotlight after all, it's easy to reactivate. Set SPOTLIGHT=-YES- in /etc/hostconfig, run in Terminal:

> mdutil -i on /</pre>and reboot.

Disabling Dashboard

To turn Dashboard off:

> defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

To turn Dashboard on:

> defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

You have to restart the Dock after making either change for it to take effect:

> killall Dock

(NB. Neither turned out to be the culprit for AirTunes. It was the broadband router which dropped more and more packages until it died a couple of months later.)