Up until yesterday my sounds been fine, I'm running with the onboard Realtek HD audio (not sure exact model) but everything was fine, now anytime I play back the sound gets real skippy/jerky (imagine woodpecker, best description I can really give) in certain parts for no reason (even with 0 cpu usage, and low memory usage) this happens on every media player I tried, and with all my mp3's and media files (including ones off of backups) so I know its nothing wrong with my players or media, so far I've updated the drivers for the sound chipset, no luck, I've tried a new soundcard, no luck, I re-imaged my drive back to about 5 days ago when it still worked (my last full drive image), no luck, I don't understand it, any help on this would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Have you looked in Device Manager and see what it says there. Jerky sound is often the result of a resource conflict from something you have installed recently. Any yellow question marks or exclamation marks will indicate a problem. Stuart

Nothing there, its really bothering me, because it makes no sense, I haven't done any hardware changes, and I any software changes since it happened has been reverted back to a working image, but yeah, nothings showing up with any conflicts on the device manager.

Well I've tried messing with the IRQ settings, nothing, I can't figure this out still...., so any help would be greatly appreciated still, thanks to who replied and thanks to anyone who will reply to this and try and help me resolve this

Do you have auto updates enabled? If so look at anything that was installed in the last day or so. Look in control panel> add/ remove programs for a list. You may need to check show updates.

Nope, auto-updates are disabled on this PC, I still can't figure it out, I've been messing with it for hours, I've even tried different speakers just to rule that out, this place is usually my last resort for solving something if I can't think of anything personally as to what the problem is, it just popped up, nothing major was changed on the system, no new hardware, no new software, no new drivers (especially after rolling back to a older drive image using Acronis) so I don't really know whats going on, but thanks so far for the suggestions, I really appreciate this place, its saved me quite a few times with problems.

So anymore ideas on fixing it? Cause if not I will just do a clean install of XP tomorrow