lance_

Alright! Thanks to Bulldogs here and Temujin|Futurelooks on IRC I've fixed things! Long story short: It was a driver issue. Installing the latest beta sound drivers for the P6T Deluxe v2 fixed it (even though I think I don't have the v2, just the Deluxe). Long story long: After trying Realtek 2.25, Realtek 2.25 beta, Realtek 2.27, P6T Deluxe latest drivers I decided to try the P6T Deluxe V2 drivers. They appeared to be more recent and I didn't think that the sound chip changed. If it did, well, the V2 drivers appear to be backwards compatable. The version that worked is labelled AD2008 Audio Driver 6.10.02.6570.

Thanks for the tip. So far I've tried the defaults, 2.25, and 2.27 from Realtek. No luck finding third party drivers since googling just leaves me with a ton of sites wanting to charge me for downloads. Any hints where I could find the user made drivers? I don't have another partition on this machine and I'd rather try for a working driver than reinstall XP.

-openal helps, a little. Now I can actually understand the speech but there's still a very annoying pop at least once per second.

Getting nasty crackling sounds. Can't understand anything anyone is saying. Audio in other games and foobar2000 works fine. Installed the March 2009 redist. Installed the Realtek 2.27 high def drivers. Running Windows 7 64-bit build 7100. Issue persists when I use -winxp flag. No luck with -dsound either. Any help appreciated.