A couple people have run into this problem before, but lowering the sound acceleration a notch usually helped.
Are you shutting down all non-essential programs (especially anti-virus) before starting the game?
Were you rounding off your amount of RAM? It should be 512; if it really is 500, that implies there is onboard video enabled on your motherboard, which is using 12MB. In that case, if you are not using it (ie for a third monitor), you should disable onboard video in your BIOS (generally you hit the escape or F1 key after the computer starts up but before Windows starts to load - there should be a message displayed on screen to that effect, or you can check your motherboard manual).
