I generally use foobar2000 for listening to ogg files on my PC. However if I like sending files to friends and very few of them use an ogg supporting player i've been trying out some direct show filters for them to install.

I've tried tobias, radlight and illiminable and they all give me totally unlistenably choppy sound in windows media player. I'm thinking it might be a problem with the my set up. Any ideas?

Try CoreVorbis

But, first I'd like to suggest you to use an other player. If you have the same problems with other players, then it could be a hardware issue or anything else.