i have a jetway v400db mobo with a built-in soundcard. the problem is, the sound(windows start) stutters during startup, but after that the sound would be normal again. any tips/insights/suggestions would be appreciated.

Do you have any devices connected at line in ???
I have TV connected to the video and line in of my grafic and sound card. Normally it's deactivated but if the TV is running while I boot I hear the TV sound for a few seconds when starting XP. Looks like XP first activates the line in port before applying the custom settings.
Depending on the device connected it may get some signals.

If you just mean the startup sound of XP does stutter my computer does it also from time to time. May have to do with XP still loading and using to much cpu load!

i think that's exactly it. Xp is using a lot of cpu load. But the strange part is, i never experienced it on my old soundcard(w/c is also onboard).

Don't think too much about that because with Windows OS's you can encounter very strange things. For example it's not really possible to get the exact same installation when you install it twice. Even if you use exactly the same drivers.

Example:
As I bought my Athlon 3,5 years ago I change 2 of the 4 harddrives and WinME crash totally out of no reason (left C: as it was and copied the partitions of the change drives!).
I had to do a new installation and after that I couldn't install the logitech pilot mouse I used for years anymore. The mouse worked fine even without driver on my new system but on the old one I lost the driver totally after 2 or 3 reboots everytime I installed it. I tried all version of the driver I could find but everytime it was the same.
At the end I bought a new mouse and it worked!

Then a few month ago I did a very bad installation and tried to reinstall a bad backup. I had to do a new installation again and believe it or not, the same problems with my new mouse!
And the old one wouldn't work either!
Then to make it even worse I was totally unable to install the drivers for all the deviced that had been on the system before. I updted the cpu from a 350MHz Pentium II to a 733MHz Celeron at the start of the year but that was the only change and it worked fine before with the Celeron (even at 1232 MHz!).
I used exactly the same drivers and tried about a dozen times in different orders but in the best case I had 4 hardware conflicts and in the worst the system just crashed totally.
Then luckily I found a CD-RW deep down in the box with all the stuff of this system and it had the Backups of Win98se and WinME on it directly after the installation of all the hardware (just forgot I made it 3 years ago!). Reinstalled it and everything worked fine, including my new mouse!

!!!!!!!!!
Get a good backup program and make a backup regularly. It can help against a lot of trouble!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!