Poor audio perfromnace on playback

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Can I get some advice on where to look for the cause of this problem, please?

Playback of recorded music (irrespective of format) is frequently poor on my system. As soon as I do anything (for example open a web-page) the playback of recorded audio is interrupted. If the application I start requires more than minimal CPU - for example opening a large image in Photoshop - the playback either stops completely or is broken up into a stream of sub-second 'bleeps'.

I have an Asus A8V mobo, with Athlon 3700+ CPU, 2 Gb of dual channel mmeory, 2 fast SATA disks, a fast Matrox display card and a Creative Audigy card. I'm sure there is enough compute power here to provide excellent (for a PC) quality playback. Indeed I record a lot of music using Audacity at 24 bit resolution, 96 KHz sampling rate, producing MP3s which are perfectly adequate for listening on the PC or in my car.

But the playback is unacceptable when ever something else is running on the PC. The hardware set-up looks to be correct. Where do I look for an explanation?
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