Weird! Taskmgr stops choppy Audio recording

[Rubic]

Can anyone help with this one please:

When recording streaming audio via Realplayer using Cool Edit Pro 2.0 I get choppy sound with dropouts EXCEPT when Task Manager is open and the active window. If I minimize Taskmgr the CPU load shoots up from about 8% to 100% and I get choppy sound again. The monitored sound itself is choppy, not just what is recorded.

Before I noticed this phenomenon I tried messing with buffer configerations etc in Cool Edit and Realplayer to no effect.

System: Athlon XP 2000 (CPU temp 47-51 C average), Abit K7RA, Platinum Live, 512 MB PC 2100, Radeon VE, Windows 2000 SP2. 1.5 GB Page file. Temp files on 40 GB seconary HD.

What is taskmgr doing and how can I fix this problem permanently?

Thanks in advance

 

[Rubic]

UPDATE: I have now realized that it is not just taskmgr but any window that ocludes the Cool Edit Pro wave display window that causes a dramatic fall in CPU useage. Clearly the graphical display of the waveform eats up a big chunk of processing time. This is crazy as the actual function of the software is sound processing and I can't belive it would have been designed that way, nor have I heard it reported (100% CPU usage on an Athlon XP 2000 to display two lousey wave channels!!). Is there a RealPlay clash for resources? Is there any way I can configure my system differently, is there somthing in the bios I should tweek? Come on tekkies, throw me a freekin bone! I don't think it's a graphics card issue as it's raw CPU power being used up.