'Crackling' sound in headphones

Hello.

For christmas I received an 'HP Premium Stereo Headset' (specs here). There has been a slight (major?) probelm with them: sometimes when browsing web pages, they crackle. This also happens when I am listening to music (i've tried it on iTunes and WMP). Another thing they've been doing is random making 3 high pitched crackle noises and then the sound in windows becomes frozen (I'll explain below what i mean by frozen.)! Then, after anywhere from a few seconds to hours later, They make the same 3, high pitched, consecutive crackle noises and the audio becomes 'unfrozen.'

When I say 'the audio is frozen,' I mean that
1. When I click the arrow on the windows volume mixer, no noises happen, and the little green bar does not ding up like it should.
2. Audio on mp3s, youtube vids, and video games does not play. At all.

Another thing is that even when the audio is frozen, if i blow into the mic on my headset i can still hear the playback from the headphones.

Since I began using the Headset, I have also accquired an ATI Raden HD 5750 graphics card. This card has an HDMI sound jack on the back, and I think that this may be part of the problem.

Here are my computer specs:
HP xw4300 workstation
Windows 7
3.2 GHz Pentium 4 HT processor
ATI Radeon HD 5750
Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card
3 GB of DDR2 RAM (2 1 GB sticks 2 512 Mb sticks)
HP Premium Stereo Headset (as mentioned above)

Thanks in advance,
TomTuff

where is the headset connected? to the sound card or front panel? if front panel, than where is that connected - sound card or motherboard?

bump... really getting to be a problem!

they don't work because they are hooked up to the mobo sound card, which is not in use by the computer because of my sound card.

it did because they dont work...