Wierd random audio plays in windows, help?

I'm running windows vista, and i believe it might of done it on xp along time ago, not sure. But anyways, every now and then, i used to hear a "cracking of a whip" sound like every minute or two, and it's very annoying. Then recently in the last week, the whipping sound is gone, but now it's been replaced with about a 1 second porn theme kind of sound. I believe the culprit to be ffdshow, but i cannot find out how to turn the noise off, or even if it is ffdshow for sure. Any help at all would be great, thanks in advanced.

yeah i've considered that, but for some reason i think it's just ffdshow mainly for the reason when the sound happens, ffdshow's tray icon appears for that brief moment, then disappear. I've disabled the tray icon in ffdshow since, and now the icon doesn't show, but the sound still plays.

alright thanks alot for your time, i'll go ahead and give it a shot and see what happens.

I'm running xp, and have exactly the same problem, ie weird random whip noise. Haven't been able to find any info on it anywhere, but am a little worried as have only yesterday formatted and reinstalled and already, after only a few hrs use, IE is crawling. Is it possible that one of the files I backed up was infected?

Am beginning to suspect it may have sth to do with Daemon tools as that's one of the few programs currently installed (Or maybe DC++ ?).

If anyone knows anyth about this rather odd problem, please post back... it's driving me mad.

Sorry to post to an old thread, but I was wondering if anyone was able to figure out was causing the problem? I'm using Windows XP though and not Vista but I get the same thing.

Instead of a whip cracking sound its the AOL Instant Messenger received message sound, followed by a short pause, in which the blue ffdshow audio decoder icon disappears, then it reappears and another received message sound plays, only to have the icon disappear again right after.

Hi, I used to have the same problem. A few days ago some weird noise (like a chime) started to play on my PC. It was seemed to play randomly and for a short moment. At the same time an icon was showing up in the taskbar and was dissapearing right after the sound ended. It was ffdshow audio decoder icon. I disabled the icon through ffdshow settings, even complately uninstalled ffdshow, the strange sound kept on popping. I tried to look at the taskbar when the sound plays, but nothing unfamiliar showed up on the programs list. Even monitoring the running processes with the procmon utility, I couldn't find anything unfamiliar. You know, the sound really made me paranoid I wondered if my PC was effected by adware, spyware, trojan or virus. Somehow later I discovered that, the weird chime sound was caused by my digital clock widget at every hour I must be getting too old for realising that I had installed it with the Yahoo Widgets a few days ago.

A program or something you did installed in recent days should cause those strange sounds, try to remember. And be careful, it can be a spyware too...