Ok for the first time I sat down and watched some of the video that was dropping frames since I did some serious clean up and maintenance on my PC. I noticed there were no dropeed frames for almost 10 minutes, then the tape hit a blank spot and 2 second later it said 7 dropped frames. Could most or all of these dropped frames come from the blank part of the tape? I've don't recall this happending before but then again none of my tapes have blank spaces throughout them.

Blank sections of tape will cause dropped frames. Before recording you should black all tapes to avoid this. Its more of an inconvience then a problem, but could cause the audio to be out at some point.
Good luck.