Well, the engineer came and had a brand new box under his arm even as he knocked on the door!!
Seems they have had a lot of this lately after sending some big updates down to various areas and ours was among them. He explained the older boxes have limited memory capacities and the various updates have just about killed a lot of them (he was also somewhat stunned that our own box was so old too). So without even checking anything on the old box he just swapped them over, put in a call to have the box registered or whatever it is they do and that was that.
Anways, we now have a new smaller box and no more stutters, so all is well. Only downside is there's no RF output on the new box so my existing 'watch upstairs' set-up has been limited now to getting it through the VCR's AV channel....Oh well, you take the good with the bad
