Hi there!
I am curious to know about thisproblem too.
I had the same "thing" for years on my new computer, though wasn't so severe as Devilharts'.
My old comp was an AMD k6-500 MHz with average specs.
Then recently I bougth a new one, PIV-3.0 GHz with pretty good specs and it does the same thing.
In the old comp when the hard disk it's being used (copy and/or write) the sound gets garbled, all messed up. And programs slowed down. But I had no real problems, just waited to finish my copying from CD or hard disk or whatever.
In my new comp it's more severe, yet stranger because doesn't happens all the time. Sometimes I boot up the comp and I get this behaviour. I restart and everything is OK, I can copy, write, read, load any program I can think of without the sound getting crapy. Usually I look if the Winamp is playing good.
So I solve this thing with restarting the computer.
But it's so damn annoying to do so.
So, what can be done? I mean, the components are brand new, and it's visible that they can work together just fine. Still sometimes they just don't do.
Rudolf