Crackling Audio, onboard -and- USB.

This has me stumped like a quad amputee.
TL;DR = scroll straight to the bottom of the post.
I upgraded my computer almost entirely. Prior to upgrading, my sound was perfect both onboard and USB.
Now I've added the following:
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 5600+
Mobo: GA-MA78GPM-DS2H (http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2859)
And 4GB of RAM.


Now.. nothing on my HDD/installation of XP has changed, other than installing drivers for the new stuff.

But since I upgraded, I'm getting crackling audio randomly.. through games, music and videos. It seems random but it possibly has something to do with CPU usage. Sometimes if I'm ingame it'll stop crackling if I alt-tab but it can still crackle if the game isn't onscreen.

It's not a speaker problem. It's happening with both my USB headphones and Logitech X530's. I can't see it being a driver fault because the onboard sound of course is a seperate driver to the driver for my USB headphones.

I've tried turning off AMD's Cool & Quiet thing in BIOS which apparently helped some issues, but didn't help. Tried disabling onboard sound but I still got the crackling through my USB headphones.

I'm certain there's something in Windows that's fucked up somewhere. Tried reinstalling Direct X and updating it, but that didn't seem to fix the problem.

So, I guess my question is, do any of you guys know what would cause crackling audio in both onboard audio and USB audio, and how I'd be able to fix it without reinstalling the OS?

I rememebr I had an XP installation where the Windows Audio service would always hog memory and CPU for some unknown reason.

If you open task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) and sort processes by CPU usage, there might be an instance of svchost.exe with an unusually high cpu usage.

If this is the case, just restart the Windows Audio service (services.msc from run dialog), right click Windows Audio and select restart.

Even if the CPU seems normal, still worth a try. Worked for me anyway