Static after a few minutes

[russell]

I'm getting extremely loud static after a few minutes of driving. It's as though I turned up the speakers all the way, and all the sounds are changed to loud distortion, but sort of repeating in 2-second waves. The problem continues even after exiting the race and going back to the navigation menus -- I have to close the program to get rid of it.

This originally happened in the multiplayer demo, but after updating the graphics card driver (the sound card driver was already updated), it seemed to go away -- I was able to complete two stages without the problem happening. But now that I've purchased and installed the retail version, it happened again after driving through about half of a Quick Race. I've tried turning off hardware acceleration in the Control Panel, and I've also tried the NOEAX and NOHARDWARESOUND command line options, without any help.

Here are my system details:

Windows XP Pro
Nvidia GeForce3 Ti200 - Driver: 6.14.0010.5672, March 24 2004
Sound Blaster Live - Driver: 5.12.0001.3300, June 12 2002
512 MB RAM

Thanks for any clues!

Russell