Other's have mentioned problems with the video drivers causing the sound to skip but they had ATI cards and need the new drivers for that. The whole system glitches with the sound cracking too. It's not the audio driver, I've read around on similar issues and other's seem to come to the same conclusion. I'm not even using the SigmaTel driver this time. I reinstalled Media Center Edition and changed nothing to cause it to falter.
I installed regular XP and the sound was perfect. Could somebody please, please, pretty please help me out? In fact prior to the Restore point the whole system (including the mouse and video visualization) would all hiccup at the same time. I've tried deleting hidden devices and starting the hardware scanning sequence from scratch and still no go. One interesting note is that after running the Diagnostics the first time I booted and the audio worked perfect! After another reboot it was ruined again and has been since, even if I duplicate the diagnostic procedure I did the first time (which shouldn't matter anyway because there is a reboot in between.) I tried the generic driver post above but that didn't work either. I've rolled back BIOS updates, video and sound drivers, and went to the earliest System Restore point and the problem persists and it is very noticeable, not bearable. It seems like something that would be caused by a running process under the Windows full boot or something to do with hardware. The sound is also fine and clean when I run the Dell Diagnostic tests in a DOS environment.
Now I'm not sure if the audio popped and cracked before the updates but I know it never did in Linux or Vista. Once the OS was installed I went down through all of the drivers and bios updates located on the support page and install whatever I could, figuring I would be up to date. I have a Inspiron 6000 and put Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 on it.