I did manage to get to the bottom of this. It purely came down to cpu usage. I recently added 2 gigs of ram (since this thread) maxing out my 32bit XP at 4 gigs, and that seemed to help a little (I know ram isn't supposed to make your computer faster but I figured I'd mention it), but I figured it out by playing the game with Task Manager open to the Performance tab on my other monitor.
Every time CPU went up to 99-100%, the sound would start crackling, and whenever I hit the water, guess what happened? So now I kill every process I can with EndItAll.exe (an oldie but goody free program) as well as Task Manager/Process Explorer, and the game runs fantastic with almost never any crackle.
Oh and I'm a weirdo who runs the game through component video TV-Out to a 36" SDTV @ 640x480 fullscreen (hey, it worked for the Dreamcast!). This allows me to crank all the settings to max even though I'm on an old computer. I hang on to this TV for my old skool games (and have an HDTV by the bed) and I never expected it to come in handy in such a bizarre way.
It's also helpful to use sites like Process Library to find out what processes you can safely kill to make it pc run as fast as possible:
http://www.processlibrary.com/direct...s/mbam/419476/
http://www.processlibrary.com/direct...svchost/24778/
Hopefully the people who randomly find this thread in searches will be glad I came back at the end.
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