I have seen this caused by the following, general devices Disk controller Sound card Now, in either case, the solution has been: Drivers BIOS flash So from my experience, drivers are the most likely cause. Turn off EAX or any fancy hardware-accelerated stuff. Stick with basic, 2-D positional audio. If it still does it, update your sound card drivers. If you have already done this, update your chipset/disk controller drivers if you have an UDMA 66 (or better) controller. If it still does it, try toggling PnP or ACPI on/off in the BIOS. If it still continues, try flashing your BIOS with the newe