Very Weird Sound Problem

[dwilliu1]

I am hoping someone out there can help me with this as it's extremely frustrating...

Background-
I have always been able to play mp3s fine in XP, and have had the same sound card for 4 years and never any issues with it. However, about a week ago after rebooting it has not been the same and something is clearly wrong.

Mp3s will play in winamp, but they seem to 'scratch' or chug along a lot more than they used to. But it seems that the performance is way too dependent on what else is running at the same time. For example, if I try to open internet explorer while playing a song, the song will basically stop playing, and then start again once IE is open. But that is if I am lucky.

If I try opening Microsoft Word or some other bigger ap while playing an mp3, winamp (or wmp) gets overwhelmed and just stops playing completely. And once that happens I can't get any sound at all and am forced to reboot. Not even system sounds will play after this happens.

I have tried many things but nothing seems to fix this problem and I just want it to be how it was.
There are 2 interesting error messages that I have gotten when trying to play sounds through media player after the sound stops, but I don't know if they really tell me anything.
The first one is "the operation cannot be completed because the pins are not connected" - or something like that.
And the other I've gotten says something like "there is no mixer device installed".

I am lost. Here is some background info and things I've tried.

1. It's a Dell p3 550 running XP with 512 ram
2. Soundcard is a Aureal/ Vortex 2 8830
3. I have uninstalled the drivers to the sound and reinstalled them with both newer ones and older ones, had no effect.
4. My NIC and video card and sound card are all using IRQ 11, but windows does not recognize any conflicts
5. I have made no major changes to my computer since this problem started, or none that I can think of.
6. My guess is that it must be a Windows problem, it is the same whether I use winamp, WMP, or anything else.
7. It has nothing to do with hardware acceleration
8. I am out of ideas and close to reinstalling XP

I will marry the person who helps me fix this.

 

[jackschmittusa]

Have you recently started using an anti-virus or monitoring app that may be sucking up a large amount of resources in the background?

 

[Amber]

:music:

it sounds like something is running in the back round and using up your CPU
take a look in your task manager

:music:

 

[dwilliu1]

Hey sorry for the delay.
I havent installed any antivirus or monitoring programs and none are running in the background that I know of.

 

[TheCorm]

Have you checked in the task manager like Amber suggested? Click on CTRL + SHIFT + ESC and goto the performence tab first and then goto the processes tab and click on the CPU header...this will let you know how much CPU power applications are soaking up...try it when idle and when playing an MP3 and surfing etc.

Jamie

 

[WeeWolf]

Did this problem start when you installed XP or did it happen a few months later?

 

[Dowfen]

I've had problems similar to this several times.... after spending a few hours debugging I usually just throw in the towel and rebuild with fresh copy of WinXP. Not always possible if you have everything just the way you like, but it usually fixes the problem.

If not... could be a hardware problem.

It is a most frustrating, I will admit.

Eric

 

[dwilliu1]

Yes I have checked task manager thoroughly and there is nothing noticeable taking up excessive processing.
I have had XP installed for about a year and never had this problem until a month ago, and I didn't install any new hardware.
Mp3s play normally when there is nothing running or even when there are many things running, but I can't have any sound playing when I open a program or else I'll have to reboot for sound again.