Professional :: NetStream Causes 100% Disk Use And Eventual Browser Crash

I've run into a troubling issue where using the NetStream class is causing odd video playback behaviour, major disk query issues, and also leading to my browsers crashing (tested on FireFox 3.5.X, IE 8, and Safari 3/4 with Flash plugin 10,0,42,34). I tested the issue on a Macbook as well and noticed the same thing, so it wasn't something specific to my machine. I wrote a basic Flex application to test this. I make a NetConnection to my web server. When successful, I create a NetStream to playback the video (F4V encoding of Big Buck Bunny). Immediately in Windows Performance Monitor, I can see the Disk queue jump to 100%. The video eventually pauses for a lengthy period of time. Sometimes the browser also becomes unresponsive at this time, and in other cases it will crash. If the video does eventually resume (disk querying reduces a bit), I experience odd behaviour with the video. If I pause the video (NetStream.pause()), when I resume the video (NetStream.resume()), the video begins to fast-forward to make up for the amount of time lost while the video was paused. So if I paused the video for 10 seconds, Flash will fast-forward in 1-second intervals through 10 seconds worth of video. During this time, NetStream will constantly dispatch buffering end and buffering full events.

What's odd is that the problem doesn't seem to happen when I add an additional arument in the play command. NetStream.play(url) will cause the issue, but NetStream.play(url, 0) will not. However, this doesn't always work. My own player, which has a lot more interface controls and complex logic, still suffers from the problem, despite that I'm not doing anything with the NetStream object.