[Scgeeks] Audio problem

[Indigo]

Recently my PC audio has been acting wonky, and not in a consistent way, of 
course :-(

I listen to live audio during the day, one uses XM Radio's application 
"x-mplayer2" which utilizes Windows Media Player (it's not really a 
streaming app, you can't record it using any streaming audio capture tools), 
while the other one uses Adobe's Flash Player "player.play.it". If you go to 
http://www.wjfk.com/pages/703221.php and click on "Listen Live" you can see 
what I mean -- that's real streaming audio and I can record it.

Lately, like the last month or so, the sound has been suffering from 
sporadic disruptions of various types. Sometimes the audio just goes silent 
(I suspect due to a temporary interruption of the stream), sometimes the 
voices "stutter", and sometimes there's just plain weird noises emenating 
from the speakers. I notice that when the CPUs are under a high load (Vista 
HP with dual core Turion processors) the problem is aggravated, but it also 
occurs when not much is going on.

I've spend most of the day examining services, apps, googling various audio 
service definitions, and reading the event files. I have a Microsoft USB KB 
plugged into a hub, and I noticed that the event list showed many, many 
warnings that appear to be associated with my KB. I also found this critical 
warning:

This process is doing excessive disk activities and is impacting the 
performance of Windows:
     File Name  : ntoskrnl.exe
     Friendly Name  :
     Version  :
     Thread time  : 6728ms
     Blocked Time  : 4947ms
     Incident Time (UTC) : 8/5/2008 3:28:45 PM

While gargling that issue, I across this:

http://tinyurl.com/6yzn8e

where a guy seems to have had problems with a corrupt ntoskml.exe file and 
linked it to a keyboard issue. Now how to tie this problem to my audio 
problem, well I'm at a loss there. My soundcard is:

Name: SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio
Manufacturer Analog Devices
Status OK
PNP Device ID 
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_11D4&DEV_198B&SUBSYS_103C2A40&REV_1003\4&93A838&0&0001
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\adihdaud.sys (6.10.1.5510, 340.00 KB 
(348,160 bytes), 10/4/2007 5:14 PM)

This is the error message that I found in the event log, the are multiple 
messages all tied to this event with slightly different info.

     Driver Friendly Name  : USB Miniport Driver for Input Devices
     Driver Version   : 6.0.6001.18000 (longhorn_rtm.080118-1840)
     Driver Total Time  : 377ms
     Driver Degradation Time : 361ms
     Incident Time (UTC)  : 8/5/2008 6:50:58 PM
     Device Name   : HID\VID_045E&PID_00B0&MI_00\8&1376409d&0&0000
     Device Friendly Name  : Microsoft USB Digital Media Pro Keyboard 
(IntelliType Pro)
     Device Total Time  : 377ms
     Device Degradation Time : 361ms

To top it off, I found a lot of warning messages about problems awakening 
from "sleep" mode (I almost always bang a key on the KB to wake it up), a 
lot of the warnings were about "ACPI Driver for NT", some of the other 
things causing the delay in wake up were "RAS SSTP Miniport Call Manager", 
"OHCI USB Miniport Driver", while the driver "HidUsb", name "USB Miniport 
Driver for Input Devices", showed up the most frequently.

So do I have two problems here, where the keyboard delays the machine from 
waking up, plus the audio problems of unknown cause, or is it all linked to 
the keyboard? The thing is only 6 months old (machine and KB), up to date 
AVG 8, scanned nightly.

I know I posted a lot of info, but any suggestions/clues would be 
appreciated!