Audio dropout every minute

[moschops]

I'm having a problem where playback of recorded content gets a couple of seconds of audio dropout about every minute. It seems to be a time based thing not related to the actual playback - if I hit pause immediately and wait a
couple of seconds I can continue with audio. Or if I rewind to replay the segment the audio is fine. I've watched in task manager while the drop out happens and there seems to be nothing else contending for the CPU (which is about 25% loaded on both CPUs) when the dropouts occur. And I've tried using 2 ch, 5.1 and SPDIF output - all get the dropouts.

Its driving my girlfriend crazy so I really need to find a solution.

My hardware is an E6750 processor, 2GB ram, Gigabye G33M-S2H mobo with ALC889A audio and I'm using Realtek 5.10.0.5523 HD Audio driver.

PS: I have a DVICO Fusion HDTV 5 Gold USB tuner but this occurs even with recorded and DivX converted files. I'm running XP Pro SP2 fully patched.

[moschops]

Update - this appears to be unrelated to BeyondTV since I finally noticed when it is happening to BeyondTV recordings it is also happening to other audio. In fact I can stop everything else on my system and play stuff with WMP and it still drops out audio.

My only clue so far is headphone output keeps going - my amp is connected via SPDIF so I suspect something in the digital audio path, a driver issue, or maybe even my amp. Unfortunately it doesn't have discrete inputs to test that.

Regardless it is not a BeyondTV problem so I'm not going to post any more - if you should happen across this thread with the same hardware and similar problems please contact me via PM.