Strange MP3 behaviour

Hey all,
Has anybody else experienced problems with the mp3s stored on their hard drives lately. My library had always been working perfectly, every song playing as it should. I have noticed now that about 5 percent of my library has some kind of corruption issues.
The most annoying problem is that a song can appear okay, all metadata etc checks out, but when I play the song on any media player (itunes, wmp and vlc) it stops at a certain point for each song (It could be 2 mins into it for one song and then twenty seconds for another).
My guess is that it started as a result of an update in windows but I cannot trace any update which could have caused this.
Also, I just did a check and a newly downloaded album contained a song with the same problem. There are also many songs which were fine before and now have lost all metadata. It is happening on both my laptop and PC (Windows 7).
So, my question is - has anybody experienced similar behaviour and if so how did you fix it? I'd really not like to have to download my library again from torrents etc.
Thanks,
Con