Distorted sound

[haplo]

hey you all!

i have been getting this annoying problem whenever it comes to games, whether it's during installing or actual gameplay. The sound starts out fine and soon gets all distorted. I solved this sound problem during installing by switching from my cd-rom drive to my cd writer drive.

but the distorted sound thingy reoccurs during gameplay after awhile (this was during Halo: Combat Evolved), exiting to the main menu and resuming the game doesn't cure it. so i had to exit the game and restart it only to go through the same thing again.

what could it be? i've checked the sound settings in the control panel, looks alright. same thing at the device manager.

for speaker setting, i chose surround speakers since i have a 2.1 system (if that's what you call two satellite speakers and a subwoofer), there was a selection for 5.1, but obviously i can't choose that, or can i?

these are my specs:

WinXP SP2
Athlon XP 2200+
MSI K7N2 Delta-L Motherboard with onboard sound (Realtek ALC650 6-channel audio)
256 DDR

what can i do about this?

[G.T.]

Double posting a question in multiple forums is both poor net etiquette and confuses things by scattering the information. See your thread in Hardware, which is the proper forum for this question.