I went thru the same thing.
It's because you are playing a pal game on an ntsc tv (or vice versa)
yes, the problem can be fixed with a patch, if that game has a patch available, check here:
http://ps2chimps.consoleinfo.com/
or
http://www.gamefreax.de/cgi-bin/gamefreax/patches.pl
hope this helps, good luck