Audio randomly distorting / jumping in volume - help?

[gatheringstorm]

I am using Windows XP with a Pentium 4 i845GE chipset (if that helps)

Recently my sound has started doing one of two things at random intervals.

It will either all of a sudden as I am listening to something, degenerate into a thick mess of modulating distortion which goes away upon restart.

or

It will jump in volume 2 or 3 times louder than normal with a scratchy bassless distortion when I am using Winamp, and is usually fixed by closing and reopening Winamp.

I have tried:

Completely uninstalling and reinstalling Winamp.

3 different soundcards. (It stareted doing it while I was still using my on board Realtek AC97 card, then tried a Creative Soundblaster Audigy, it still did it, so I went and swapped it for another Audigy to be safe, still did it)

I have tried 2 different sets of speakers and a pair of headphones.

I have wiped all my audio devices and drivers, disabled the on board sound and done a fresh install with the Creative Soundblaster Audigy.

Still does it, I am at a complete loss.

Can anyone help me, PLEASE!

[Reegs]

That's a really weird thing to be happening. What sort of background processes do you have running? Any antivirus or update checkers?

[gatheringstorm]

Haha, yeah its completely retarded.

Your post gave me an idea. I just started exiting programs running in the background and found that when I exited my Last FM client the distortion stopped. Wtf.

I will try uninstalling Last FM and see if it stops it haha.

[Reegs]

Glad to hear I was helpful. Please let us know the results of your experiment!

[gatheringstorm]

Damn so it stopped doing it for a while but has just come back again.

Something I noticed was that when i opened the task manager, the processes were maxed out at 100% and as i closed some stuff and it came down the noise seemed to go away again. I have 1.25 gig of ram though so I dont know.

Any more ideas?

[gatheringstorm]

bump..........

[Reegs]

Sounds like something is stealing CPU cycles. What are the names of the processes that you're closing?

[gatheringstorm]

When I closed the Last.fm client it seemed to stop it. Only other processes I quit were Firefox and I think Nero Background Monitor. Hmm.

[Reegs]

If you uninstalled last.fm what was the agent still doing on your machine? There might be a way to disable it from loading on startup. See if the program itself lets you do it, or if you need to use msconfig