Sound keeps hanging..

Well I recently bought a new computer, or at least mostly, I put one together with a new motherboard, cpu, memory, hd, videocard and psu, the rest of the hardware in it comes from my old pc (cd roms and such).

But everytime im relaxing and listening to music the sound hangs for like half a second every now and then, ive already tried using different output devices but none of this helped. The motherboard I bought has an onboard audiocard which I turned off in bios so I could supposedly use my Creative SB Live! 5.1 optimally, none of that though.. this card always worked like a charm on my old pc but now its bitching around.. I personally think the motherboard has something to do with it but I already tried playing with the bios settings and updating to the latest version.. I also updated the VIA drivers to the latest but no luck there either.

The sound only seems to hang when using an mp3 player (I used various mp3 players to test) while it doesnt hang when playing a game or watching a video.

Ive tried using both the microsoft sound mapper and the one that comes with the soundcard, tried hardware acceleration, increasing the buffer length.. you name it.. nothing helped so far..

so im coming here as a last resort, hoping someone had the same experience and managed to fix it.

Heres some of my system specs that might make a difference:

Motherboard: Asus a7v400-mx
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400+
Memory: 512 PC2700 DDRAM (DDR333)
Soundcard: Creative SB Live! Player 5.1 (using it threw my surround set)

I have the latest direct x version installed (SDK version) and the latest creative drivers, other then that no software that controls the audio as far as I know..

hopefully someone can help.. thanks a lot in advance!

little update, tried using the onboard soundcard for a change.. same problem.. sound keeps hanging every now and then and just for a millisecond each time.. im starting to think its not my soundcard causing the problem..

I suspect it is not your soundcard as well. I would be inclined to assume that there is something such as an antivirus scanner or diskeeper or some such process that fires off every so often and when it does, it consumes enough resources for that one second of time that your mp3 read stream is disrupted, causing the sound to stutter and then the system catches up on its cycles and everything is back to normal.

well I got so sick of it yesterday, I grabbed my pc, ripped it open and placed the memory card in another slot, ripped out the soundcard and exchanged it for another one (same model) but also in another slot.

ever since then its been working like a charm.. so im gonna hope it stays like that

thanks anyway for your help medialint, appreciate it

nice to hear everything is working now.