Bizarre sound issues in Unreal Tournament

[Scathe]

I recently reformatted/reinstalled my primary drive; it's something I do every six months to a year as I'm sure many of you do. This time around, however, I've been getting a bizarre echo/distortion effect when playing Unreal Tournament. The music and SFX are jittery and distorted, but only when in the UT shell. If I Ctrl+Esc to Windows, I can hear the music clearly. Anyone had any experience with this before? Suggestions welcome...
PS- This problem does not appear in any other game on my system, and I have tried reinstalling UT from multiple discs with the same problem manifesting.
TIA-
Scathe

Specs:
Celeron 1.1GHz 100MHz bus w/ AlphaPep 66 fan
640MB RAM (2x256, 1x128) PC 133
GeForce 2 64mb 4Xagp
NIC 10/100 (PCI)
SB PCI 128
Asus TUV4X board (Socket 370)
realmagic dvd decoder
pci parallel card
--less important--
6x dvd (samsung) 32x cdread
16x12x40 yamaha cdr
40 GB WD 7200
60 GB WD 7200
floppy 1.44, of course
(DirectX 8.1)

[Scathe]

I had a thought, but I need sleep before I try it out. I was wondering what you guys would think. I have 640MB of memory installed on this system. Since I'm running 98SE, do you think that could be part of the issue, since 98/ME apparently encounters trouble running more that 512? Just a thought. Goodnight.

Scathe

[redduc900]

You didn't mention which OS you're using, but if it's XP...you might want to give this a try:

Open the advanced preferences in UT (type "preferences" from the console, without the quotes), open the "Audio" section, change "EffectsChannels" to 8, change "Latency" to 60 and restart UT. The problem is caused by Win XP's HDD prefetching algorithm...loading the UT modules before the sound subsystem can initialize properly - hence it only occurs when UT loads from the system cache. ;)