Sluggish audio

["Reuben D. Budiardja" <techlist voyager phys utk edu>]

Hi,
I hope someone can help me here. I have sound blaster AWE64 PnP soundcard. The 
soundcard is found by kudzu after I install kernel-unsupported, and now it's 
using the kernel module :
sb                      9012   2 
sb_lib                 44014   0  [sb]
uart401                 8164   0  [sb_lib]
sound                  72756   2  [sb_lib uart401]
soundcore               6372   5  [sb_lib sound]

However, when I play ogg files, using ogg123 or xmms, I experience audio 
sluggishness. Sound intermitenly stops and then go again when I do the 
following, for example:
1. Resizing firefox windows (maximize, minimze)
2. Browsing, especially during page loading. Even thing as simple as loading 
http://www.yahoo.com or www.google.com
3. switching around virtual desktop
4. Even when I do "ls -la /usr/bin/*" in xterm, audio will be very sluggish, 
sometimes stop until the scrolling of the xterm windows is over.

It seems like the audio / sound card processes does not have enough priority. 
I really don't know how to figure out. I've played around with the BIOS setup 
for PCI (eg. I turned of PCI Delay Transaction option), but I still have the 
same problem.

I thought it has something to do with the load of the machine, but I've tried 
compiling kernel and apache while playing xmms, and in that case it was fine. 

So any help/ideas will be appreciated. This same hardware used RH 7.3 before 
and it didn't have this problem. I am using OSS driver. 

Thanks in advance.
Reuben D Budiardja