Sound problems, a sign of bad caps?

[KILLorBE]

I'll try to keep it short.
My Asus P3V4X makes strange popping/clicking noises when playing MP3's, also when I run F@H it doesn't finish a single WU (It keeps saying Early unit end).
But when I play a WAV file I don't hear strange noises.
I've replaced everything (RAM, PSU, Mouse, Keyboard, CPU, Sound card, IDE cable, HDD, Graphics card) except the MOBO (doh) and 2 NIC's.
I also did a fresh install.

First thing that came to mind was a power issue, but I don't want to buy caps if I'm not sure (the caps look fine).

The MOBO is 3+ years old and has Sanyo Gold on green 1500uF 6.3V caps, and a few Silver on green Sanyo caps.

Suggestions are welcome.

[Topcat]

I doubt caps are your problem. Sanyo caps are not prone to failure. If it was a cap problem, the audio would do it all the time, and there would be other serious issues with the system. Experience tells me this is a driver issue. I had an SB Live do that very thing to me in a VP6. I played around with different driver packages, and eventually fixed it using the embedded driver in XP.

[stretch0069]

How long can you play music until the popping and clicking...or does it do it as soon as you play?

Way back when I was having probs with my VP6, this happened to me...among other annoying things. A lot of things cleared up when I replaced the caps and got a proper PS.

[KILLorBE]

Thanks for the replies.

The problem is solved, not sure what it was (yet) as I've changed 3 things:
1) Swapped the V3800 Ultra Deluxe (which doesn't like Ali chipsets, maybe it doesn't like VIA chipsets either) for a GF2 MX.
2) Went from ME to W2K (After all those years installing ME became a ritual and I never had this problem before).
3) One of the IDE connector pins on my DVD-Rom was bent, maybe it corrupted the install.