This is a Media Center issue. There is no pausing when I use Pinnacle's TVCenterPro (which I just discovered it came with.
My cookie here got deleted, and when I tried to login/forgot/restore cookie it doesn't know my e-mail address. Maybe I mistyped it. So I couldn't add this as a comment above.
I made a new post, "Media Center - TV constantly pauses 1/2 second then plays 1 second" which is much more complete. A superuser can delete this one.