Staticy Sound - very bad

Hi, the only thing keeping me from activating my account with this cool game is this sound problem i have. What happens is the sound is just fine for the first 10-20 mins in game, then as time goes on more there is more static that seems to accompany every sound in game, including the User Interface sounds. This happens until i have to switch off the sound cause it's so irritating.
This sort of thing hasnt happened in any other game, and i'm pretty much a big gamer.
I have a Radeon 9700 pro and i'm not sure if it's linked to that. The game makes it so the 9700 pro has to be set to AGP manually outside the game. When i did set the game to AGP manually the sound problem seemed to get better. I havent tested it enough to tell if it's totally fixed or not. BUT when the game is in this AGP mode it crashes in about 10-20 mins, lol.
I may try some different catalyst drivers to see what works. i have the latest catlyst drivers going now, and updated my motherboard bios, and drivers. My sound system is the nvidia2 sound system found on Asus A7N8x Boards.

System:
AMD Athlon 2700+
Radeon 9700 Pro
Motherboard : Asus A7N8x - this is where sound comes from
Western Digital ATA100 7200rpm 120GB HD (where game is)
Maxtor ATA 133 120 GB HD
HP 300i DVD burner
1 gig RAM

Hmm, I have the same motherboard, and I know what you're talking about, but it's nowhere near as consistent as you're saying.

I believe it's caused a bug in FMOD, SL's audio library, that has to do with CPU usage getting maxed out by the renderer and not enough resources being dedicated to the audio thread, which ends up getting corrupted as a result. From reading the FMOD forums, I haven't been able to confirm or refute this, though I note that there are plenty of FMOD developers complaining about it.

If you care to test my hypothesis, try turning all your visual settings down and seeing if it shows up in the same timeframe. If so, at least you know what causes it.