Sound Corruption

The Problem :
When listening to music (MP3 or ingame) and other audio (sound effects etc) my PC suffers an audio stutter. It occurs every 4-5 seconds and lasts about half a second. It sounds like a judder and the entire machine joins in (in windows the mouse stops and in-game the whole thing briefly pauses).

The problem doesn't occur when the sound isn't in use. The problem will occur even if only a simple program like winamp is running with all anti-virus and spyware removal products switched off.

The Hardware :
It's my main rig so the spec is:
1 : Athlon XP2600 Barton | 512Mb Crucial | ASUS A7V8X | Radeon 9800 Pro | Videologic SonicFury | Maxtor 120Gb + 40Gb | NEC DVD | Samsung CDRW | Coolermaster ATC-201B-BXT | Yamaha TSS-1

Can you suggest any avenues of investigation?

Thanks,

Vimeous

Not sure, but check your northbridge temps/southbridge/sound card temps,
also try moving it into a different pci slot.

Sounds (ho ho ho) like an IRQ conflict. Look in device manager and see if it is and then try an find a PCI slot that doesnt result in IRQ sharing.

Try changing the level of direct sound acceleration and report back with what level of acceleration alleviates this problem.

Yea turning down the level a notch on my pc for direct sound acceleration stopped massive static and distortion in Cs. Now that i've reformatted i haven't had to...

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. The problem is now solved.
I had a long think about the history of the sound card (I've had it years) as I've had it in various different machines. Usually a complete uninstall/reinstall of the drivers fixed the problem but this time it hadn't.
That said I persevered reinstalled them again and eventually the problem went away!

PCI shuffle was next on the list (thanks for the suggestion) :)

Thanks to all.