Arthate

Hi, my sound has been acting very strange all of a sudden - The sound has become drowned-out, skips, and changes volume spontaneously. I have been using a Sound Blaster Audigy SE without issue for the past year, and the onboard sound without issue years before then. I was listening to music fine without problems a few hours ago. Before I noticed the strange behaviour, I've burned a couple CD's, copied some files to a USB flash drive, and installed the Ext2 IFS 1.1 driver (to read Linux-formatted flash drives). After the install, it didn't seem to work, so I uninstalled it. Then I noticed the sound problems. So I thought, when I uninstalled it, I may have removed an important system file. I reinstalled it, hoping to solve the issue, with no luck.
I performed a system restore, with no luck. Uninstalled/reinstalled the sound drivers...with no luck. I followed a couple troubleshooting procedures on Microsoft.com that didn't work. All system functions seem normal, no spike in CPU or RAM load when playing audio.

This is where it got interesting, I disabled the audigy, and switched to my onboard sound, rebooted, and it was the same thing! I'm really not sure what to do now. I don't wan't to resort to reformatting, as I have a lot of important stuff on my computer it would take me forever to restore. Does anyone have any possible solutions?

Thanks.

EDIT: I forgot to add, that it is not the headphones. It produces the same sound on two pairs and my speakers. Also, the headphones work fine on my mp3 player.