Dumb suggestion, but if it doesn’t do any good, you haven’t lost anything. Try reseating the sound card. Turn everything off, disconnect all power, ground yourself on the chassis, then pull the card all the way out, and put it back in. I’ve seen this clean up more random noise problems than makes sense. More often on video cards than sound cards, but as I said, it can’t hurt.
I deleted a lot of new apps, backed up all the most important files on five CDs (thank the IPU for CD Writers!), and installed the latest drivers from Yamaha.
Guess what. Still the noise. BUT it also freezes totally when using a lot of sound apps, like ICQ and Winamp at the same time, even after re-installing Winamp. So there is definately something amiss. The system menu doesn’t show any hardware conflicts, so I might try Nelsons solution tomorrow night.
If not, it’s time to take it to the shop and have it checked out. It needs new memory anyway: 64 MB for a Pentium III 550 means a full virtual mem at all times 
But maybe I need to reinstall everything from scratch. At least I have everything backed up now!
Pick yourself up a Sound Blaster Live! sound card… them’s the greatest…
And get some more RAM… and a bigger HD (60 gigs oughtta do it)… then a bigger monitor (21" flatscreen?)… then a 16X DVD-ROM drive… oh, and just for the heck of it, get a DVD-RAM drive, too… and then top it all off with a GeForce II 64-meg video card.
And finally, get Diablo II, and I’ll see your ass on Battle.Net.
(I’m hardly being serious… well, half-serious)
Heh 
In terms of games, I’m a simple man. I like racing and thinking. So GP3 is a big YES, and so are all Tomb Raider games. Shoot-em-ups tend to bore me after a while. Strategy stuff like C&C is for NERDS, not for me.
But as it is, nothing with sound goes, so I’ll have to fix it first before I can play Michael Schumacher at Suzuka 
Did you try adjusting the speaker cables connected to your sound card? You never said if you did or not. Sometimes my speaker cable will be moved slightly and I’ll get all sorts of distorted sound and static. A little adjustment while a sound source is playing might help resolve the issue.
Yeah, tried that. Cleaned the socket and the pin, too. To no avail, I regret to inform you
did you try the line out instead of speaker out? It still could be the jack.
Yup, tried that too, but line out gave no sound whereas speaker does. Albeit distorted.
Maybe you need to try some percussive maintenance (whack the damn thing!)
Okay, okay, don’t… but it seems like you need some new hardware, Cold’ems (and I was serious about the SBLive). Then again, the best course of action would be to get a computer-savvy person to look at it in person… I mean, there’s only so much we can do…
Also, I was serious about Diablo II…
OK, the latest in the Sound Card Saga. Today, it played the windows startup sound, without distortion - but at a SLOWER SPEED! Only to crash after 20 seconds of WinAmp MP3’s. Now, I’ve just removed the f*cker from the system list in Control Panel, and the computer works without a flaw. The new drivers obviously didn’t help.
What says you techies? Am I looking at a busted Sound Card?
Sounds like a fried sound card to me. How good is your surge protector, or are you using a UPS/line conditioner? With all the sun spot activity lately epecially you never can tell when a surge is gonna come down the line and pop a circuit. Th ebest way to test it is to throw it in another computer and see what happens.
Uhm, HUH?
It’s plugged into a grounded socket, if that’s any help… I’ll see if I can test it in another puter though.