computer 'hangs' once every 5mins or so

Hello, I'm new to the forums here and I was hoping that some of you experts out there could help me out with a bit of a problem I've run into in the past 2 days.

My computer was running fine up until about 2 days ago, when while listening to some music and playing a game, I noticed that the sound would seem to buzz out for a few seconds every so often.

It becomes really noticeable when I'm just listening to music in my room: the song will keep playing, and then for about 2 seconds, it will sort of trill, or 'vibrate' (i dunno really how to describe it, like.. electric distortion from some techno song) and the computer will hang, then everything resumes (happens like once every 5 mins or so, though its not always consistent).

This is not just a music related issue, while playing a game, the video completely freezes for the same length of time, and it's extremely annoying!

I have the latest Radeon and nVidia Nforce drivers installed, and it's been about two months since I reformatted my comp. This has never happened before either.

I can't really think of what might have caused this, so if anyone has an idea as to what the problem might be, please let me know. Thanks!
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incase this stuff matters:

AthlonXP 2600 on windows XP service pack 2
512 DDR RAM
Radeon 9500
250GB WesternDigital hard drive, 80GB Maxtor hard drive (operating system on this, pagefile goes to other)
Asus A7N8X motherboard

nothing here is overclocked or anything either, please let me know if theres anything else relevant

Hi. Perhaps your problem is resolved, but if it isn't, you might temporarily disable any virus scan and firewall software to see if that helps. Sometimes these programs take up a lot of cpu power while they monitor activity. Another possibility could be the Auto Insert Notification option that the cd-rom uses to monitor the cd-rom drive. That is found in the cd-rom settings under Device Manager. But since this is a recent problem, I doubt the Auto Insert idea will help. Good luck, though.