Expendable from Rage Software and Star Wars: Episode I Racer from LucasArts. Both great games. Both games I use to test Windows 98 and Windows XP systems. And strangely united by a recurring problem...

These two games frequently have sound issues for me. Sounds and music are choppy and distorted. Sometimes I can remedy it, fully or partially, by turning down sound hardware acceleration in Control Panel. But I want to fix this properly, dammit!

Here's the weird part:

I've seen these issues on at least three completely unrelated systems over just the past year. Can't remember exactly which ones, but I'm pretty sure at least one was Windows XP (others were Windows 98 SE). Completely different hardware, including sound cards. And, on all of these systems, other games and applications had no sound problems. None at all. So something is up here. My current working theory is resource conflict (IRQs or something), but I have zero experience troubleshooting those kinds of issues so I don't know where to begin. These systems all had PCI sound cards, by the way. And I don't remember having any other system stability or performance issues.

Anyone experienced similar issues with these games before? Any ideas on how to track down a solution?

Current system I'm seeing this on, for reference:

Dell Inspiron 8100
256 MB RAM
40 GB HDD
GeForce2GO
ESS Maestro 3i

Slightly weird setup, as I'm running Windows 98 SE with Windows ME drivers (only ones available), but a bunch of other games run fine. And, as stated before, these are exactly the same issues I've run into on other systems. Very suspicious.