as i posted on another thread i have the same crackling issue with some games, i tried the toshiba rsr utility and that mad things worse, my left speaker/headphone had a constant distortion. i tried setting hardware perfomance to none in DXDIAG and taht fixed my UT2004 crackling sounds... BUT it made my WoW to start crackling, sigmatel mocks me... but its definetly a software issue. alas theres no new drivers and i reckon that there will be no new drivers. i guess my only solution will be to wait for a card Xfi or soemtihg like that for my dell 9400.