I consider myself a pretty computer savvy guy, but this is some of the strangest behavior I’ve seen. I have winamp on pretty much 24/7, and so I often notice that the volume randomly changes. It’s quick, shifting from loud to soft, or vice versa, in less than a second. But it’s not just winamp–if another application is playing audio, its volume goes shifts at the same time; leading me to think that either windows system volume is changing, or something to do with my speakers, or something to do with my sound card settings is.
I have WinXP, a Soundblaster Audigy, and Creative Soundworks FPS2000 speakers attached to it via S/PDIF.