Power outage, now myth won't play correctly

[Cowman]

Had a power outage the other night. Apon restarting the system, I found that when I tried to either watch livetv or recordings the video was extremely choppy and in the consle it was repeating 'prebuffering pause' over and over.
also while this is happening I noticed that the cpu usage was at 99% I enabled use libmpeg2 for playback which dropped usage down to around 70-80 but this is still much higher than normal.

DVD playback works fine. in fact all video playback using anything other than myth works fine. I also have a remote front end... it can play back things from this backend normaly so I think whatever is wrong it has to be this frontend.

The cpu is at the correct speed, dma mode is enabled on the hard drive. No swap is in use and there is free memory. I cleared channel & card settings. I even went as far as to apt-get remove mythtv-frontend and reinstall it. Nothing helps. Before I resort to grabbing an extra hard drive and trying to install a completely new copy of linux is there anything else to try?