Did you try disabling sound hardware acceleration completely?

Did you go through the sound tests in dxdiag's Sound tab?

A few people have had sound problems on multi-core systems, which in a couple cases could be fixed by setting the game to run on a single core. HyperThreading in a single core P4 CPU (if you have it enabled) probably isn't going to have the same effect, though.
see; Sound errors with static - maybe fix found!

I assume you are shutting down all non-essential programs (especially anti-virus) before starting the game?

If you set the sound effect and ambient volume levels to zero, does that get rid of (or reduce) the distortion and background noise?


If you do resort to reinstalling the OS, do you have a spare drive / partition you can use? If not, at least make a full backup of your current system. If the problem isn't something in the OS or a conflict with something else installed, it could be a pain to loose all the changes and tweaks made to your system without it even helping (not to mention wasted time re-installing everything else).


Are you familiar with Linux? I got the game going a couple years ago without having used Wine before, or Linux much, though with stability problems. IIRC Xanlosch also had stability issues at the time, though I think only occasionally. More recent versions of Wine may work better.
DD on linux / Xanlosch's guide


[color:"orange"]My hard disk died at least 3 times when I was playing this game, back in 2002 and 2003.[/color]

Ouch. The hard drive in my first PC died at the start of a long-overdue backup, and the replacement (which I had to pay to have cross-shipped, to try to get data recovered off the original) had more than 50% bad clusters (not that it mattered much, since there was physical damage to the original, and nothing could be recovered). The second replacement only lasted a few months, but the one after that lasted almost a year (there wasn't anything important on it either time, since I didn't trust it). The final replacement still works, AFAIK (it is in a system built from spare parts, which I don't think has even been turn on in quit awhile).