Audio choppy until I plug an external USB drive

[gjupp]

Using VLC 1.1.4 on an XP system. Its just a little eMachines netbook with N450 processor and 1GB ram.

My brother and I both have the same netbook, VLC playback runs fine on mine but on his machine the audio in videos is choppy with audio glitches every few seconds. The strange thing is that it can be fixed by plugging in an external USB drive or pendrive. The movie is being read from internal drive though. Even plugging in a Wifi modem fixes the issue. At least until you restart the PC.

The only real differences between the two netbooks is that his has the drivers for the USB wifi modem installed. Im wondering if the system is polling the USB ports on his machine when nothing is plugged in and thus causing a CPU spike that creates the audio glitches?

Anyone else seen a similar issue with a better solution?

[ivoire]

I never heard about such issue. But according to your description I agrea to your concusion about a faulty driver. Just try to remove the USB wifi driver and see if it change something...