Preventing audio pauses in Vista

With the release of a number of hardware drivers over the last couple of months, I've finally been in a position to upgrade my main dev machine to Vista. Everything has gone remarkably well, with the exception that I was getting very noticeable pauses when listening to audio files in WMP at high CPU loads. Even when I set the priority of WMP up to Highest, the pauses still occurred. I found that the problem was actually the high definition audio codec, and by disabling all enhancements (see screenshot), the pauses have all gone.



The only other problem I'm trying to iron out in a benign crash in explorer.exe that occurs when WMP is minimized to the Taskbar and VS2005 is running under the full admin token. I get a dialog box coming up saying explorer.exe has been terminated and prompting for the selection of a debugger. So far I haven't been able to track down the exact cause...