m250 VBR audio stuttering?

I just picked up a new Sansa m250, and the audio skips and stutters when playing VBR encoded MP3 tracks. I tried a couple of CBR tracks, and they sounded fine, it’s just the VBR ones. It’s a V4 player with the latest firmware, I tried formatting it and all that, no dice. Unfortunately, all the mp3s I buy from Amazon are encoded in VBR, so there’s no easy way around this problem. It’s a bit surprising that my ancient SanDisk SDMX1 player can play VBR MP3s just fine, but this newer m250 chokes up as bad as it does.

Anyone know if this can be fixed? Is SanDisk working on a fix/do they even care about the m200s anymore?

After a little more messing around, it seems to be able to handle a CD that I ripped at ~200kpbs VBR, whereas the MP3s from Amazon are ~256kbps VBR. Maybe the higher bitrate is doing it? I rip my tracks using WinAMP, which I believe uses LAME to encode, but I don’t know what Amazon uses, so maybe there’s some small encoding issue that’s doing it too.