Sound glitches in video rendering

I am working with a computer that has a Tyan Thunder K8W MB, Dual AMD Opteron Processor 244, 2gb RAM, Radeon RX800 video card, Silicon Image Sil3512 SATARaid Controller w/ 149gb mirrored raid, nVidia Raid Controller w/ 689gb Raid5, 2 DVD burners, 1 floppy drive, dual monitors

I have been working on rendering video for several years. Now all of a sudden intermittently when I render a video the sound is horrible - static glitches throughout the rendered movie. I am not sure where to even look for the solution to this problem. Any ideas?

Another problem that has appeared lately and could possibly be related is browsing any folders with video or image files Windows Explorer has an error and "unexpectedly" quits. This causes all the settings for my desktop to be lost. Any help?

Thanks.

Did you install anything recently, like video codecs? Any driver changes?

A gigabyte mobo I was using had the Sil3512 chip and gave me a lot of headache. I think it's got buggy drivers. I remember I had problems with divx. When I switched to the nforce controler all problems were gone. I didnt check for newer drivers for this Sil3512 in a long time maybe you could get newer drivers if they are available.

Possible fixes I can think of:
1. Try to disconnect the drives on the Sil3512 if this isnt your boot partition and turn it off in the BIOS if possible
2. Run memtest and prime95 to check for any errors
3. It's a software error or it's a hardware error. So to try and eleminate the software side reinstall windows and install only the bare essentials to work then check if the same thing happends again.

Ok. Try this and report back. Good luck mate I know these strange problems are sometimes difficult to fix.