garbled mic playback and webcam dead!!

OK guys and gals!

I have windows corp XP 32 bit, 4 gigs of ram (only recognizes 3.5 as warned) a 250 gig HDD, and ASUS MBD AMD 2.6 GHZ dualcore. I noticed when I record my voice and play it back that it is horribly garbled, and my web cam just pops up a solid screen with no image. I have unplugged my webcam and reinstalled it, got updated drivers, and used a DIFFERENT mic! No avail! I even switched my soundcard with an old PCI one that I had. NO AVAIL! I am using AIMP2 but I used the generic windows sound recorder and it does the same thing.

I am convinced that this is software, not hardware! I think it might be some DLL or corrupted registry key or something meticulous in software. Do you know of any universal tools that can dig for something this meticulous and weird? Or better yet do you guy know of anything that might need to be checked for this?

Thanks!!!!!!

THETA Q