In my version of Wing Commander IV the Price of Freedom there are these annoyingly long pauses of black screen in between the cutscenes before they'll start playing. The rest of the game works fine but the pauses really interrupt the flow of the game. I've tried various fixes online some did more damage then good resulting a a reinstall. IS anyone else experiencing these pauses and How do I fix them?

Try this suggestion from WC3, but not sure if it applies to WC4:

https://www.gog.com/forum/wing_commander_series/wc3_brief_pause_when_changing_from_cutscene_to_other/post4

It's to build up tension.

I took a look at your suggestion. While there is no settings option for Wing Commander IV I was able to fix another issue I was having for Wing Commander III so thanks there.

Still haven't found a way to resolve the 10 second delay between cut scenes.

As an experiment, if your processor has dynamic frequency scaling options such as AMD's TurboCore and Cool'n'Quiet features, or Intel's equivalents, try disabling these features then starting the game. Some older games are affected by the CPU clock dynamically changing while the game runs and causing timing related problems the game isn't adept to handle. It can cause crashes, time delays, and all sorts of other problems. If the problem goes away when testing this, then that was likely the cause.

An example of a game that has a problem like this is Far Cry, which has a long pause when loading a mission. Once the mission is loaded it runs fine, but there is an ultra long delay loading it if dynamic frequency scaling is used.

Hope this helps, if not fix the issue then narrow it down a bit.