Hmph. This ain't gonna do...USB Headset woes

All right. I've been living with this problem but now I had better quit being complacent and fix it.

I am an Avid World of Warcraft player. I'm pretty new to the game, but I'm pretty involved. I bought this laptop based on the system requirements for WoW back in March.

Now, when I play Wow, I use Ventrilo. I have a Logitech USB headset, which was strongly recommended by other wow players. (there is in-game voice chat. the sound quality is horrible, and no one uses it.)

now sometimes, at random it seems, I get a blue screen of death... but only when I am playing world of warcraft and using ventrilo at the same time. I can listen to music from my music player on my USB headphones and play wow. I can be in ventrilo for hours at a time when i'm not running WoW. but if I put the two together... the clock is ticking.

I might BSOD in the middle of an instance. I might BSOD just sitting in a town. I might BSOD because I tabbed out to look something up on wowhead... or I might not. I can never tell when it's going to happen.

the reasons for the blue screen vary. I've gotten:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

A few times. I've had kmixer.sys indicated as the cause of the problem.

and then today, I got BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER. I'm pretty much boggled.

I've gone looking for updates to my video card, sound card, and USB ports, but I get consistent report that there are no updates. and that's the end of my hardware fixing powers.

What can I do to determine what the problem actually is? I'm running Windows XP Media Edition, if that will help explaining where to go in my control panel and where to go when I get there.

Majorgeeks helped me with a devilish spyware problem on a friend's computer a couple of years ago, so I figured this would be a great place to get advice.

 

just bumping this in case someone has an idea what to do. My computer crashes at least once a day because of this problem.