Hello Manning and Mac!
Thanks again for the responses!
Manning,
I downloaded the prog you suggested and found the culprit to be my pci wireless network card as the only device when activated sent the graph up into the yellow and reds. And when disabled, all stayed in the green and prog said this machine should be able to handle streaming audio and video with it disabled. FYI--I do have a second 500gb Seagate HDD installed in this machine when I built it a few months ago, but for some reason the system does not seem to recognize it. At least it has never worked. Just have not had the time nor extra moolah to getit taken to a computer shop to find out why. The second drive shows up in the device manager but all the pertinent
stuff shows up greyed out for it. So you see I actually did plan to have a second HDD for the music files. If it is of interest both HDD's in this machine are Seagate 500gb 7200 rpm 32mb cache drives. The cpu again is the Q6600 quad set at 1066Mhz fsb and the 4gb ram is PC-8500 in 2, 2gb sticks set at 1066Mhz as well. OS is XP Pro sp-3.

Mac,
As stated to Manning above I have 2 hard drives in this machine. Both are 500gb 7200rpm 32mb cache drives, but only one is working right now.
As to your suggestion of looking at the IRQ situation, I did that and found that the 2496 card is listed as IRQ 19 along with 4 other things under IRQ 19 as well.
Don't know enough about computers to know what to do about that.
Also, No, I do not use the S/PDIF.
Oh,BTW I did try to use the 2496's asio again and it seemed to want to work better than the asio4all but still had lots of popping sounds in the audio.
Hope this answered you questions.
Thanks again

Larry