Internet Explorer Causes Sound Distortion

[HacktheHacker]

On my son's computer, if he is playing music from his hard drive (Musicmatch, Windows Media, Real Player) everytime he opens internet explorer the sound distorts for about 3-4 seconds. We also tried this with a dvd in intervideo and the same thing happens. Any ideas as to what might be causing this?

He has Windows XP Home SP2, 1gig ram, 200 gig hd, realtek ac97 sound. All drivers are up to date. System restore was disabled so we cannot go back. Sound plays fine if no internet is open.

[guns1inger]

realtek AC97 sound is on board audio, is it not ? These tend to rely on the CPU for alot of what they need to do, so if you launch something that temporarily requires the CPU's attention, it can cause playback issues.

The only solution I know of is to get a good, low priced audio card, and to disable the on-board audio in the bios. A cheap, low end sound blaster will do a better job than the on-board audio.

[CrayonEater]

Long drive reads and writes when IE is opening can also cause problems too. Although guns1inger's solution is more likely to help, try having your son move his audio files to a faster disk (preferably, if there are two hard disks on the system, the one that IE is NOT on, which usually means don't have them on the C: drive.

Incidentally, two possibly-unrelated problems jump out at me. First, your son uses RealPlayer. Probably not a good idea since it's still technically spyware. Also, using IE is bad enough, but if your son visits music-related sites using IE, he's asking for trouble. Music sites, along with porn sites, are the biggest offenders when it comes to installing malware and browser hijackers, including the malware-ish apps some sites "require" to use them. Aside from the obvious security problems that poses, that means you may have a lot of hidden stuff opening up with Internet Explorer, contributing to slower load times, more CPU overhead, and all the other fun stuff that accompanies browser hijacking. I can't stress enough that he should discontinue using IE under any circumstance, if not for security reasons, then performance reasons.

[HacktheHacker]

Thanks for the replies. I did some troubleshooting but nothing worked so we backed up his stuff and did a re-install of the o/s. Everything now works fine. We do have top of the line virus and spyware programs which never found anything and IE always loaded fast. Hopefully this will now be ok but we will watch to see what happens. Thanks again.