Periodic Freezes accompanied by looping sound

[Ferroque]

I've been having some weird freezes recently- while playing Dystopia (for example), the game will freeze and whichever sound is playing at that moment will loop for a few seconds, followed by another sound. Often, a the skybox and architecture of a map will then disappear for a moment, and the game will return to normal. Frame rates are uniformly ok when the game isn't frozen.

Anyone have any advice? I updated my GPU drivers today, and the problem continued.

My system is:

2.5 GHz P4
512MB RAM
GeForce 4 Ti4600
Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value

Has anyone had a similar problem? How did you solve it? Do you know what causes it?

EDIT: And for the record, I've tried playing with -nosound added to a shortcut; the freezes continue.

 

[Beerdude26]

I heard that Creative sound cards tend to mess up HL2. Maybe ask someone to take the sound card out and play without it for a while? If it doesn't crash, you'll just have to buy another sound card =(

 

[Ferroque]

Sounds worth a try, but it's odd that such a problem would only appear now; I've had the game since release and have completed it several times, as well as playing for hours on Counter-Strike and HL2DM with no more than occasional problems.