Laptop with ESS soundcard: Sound distorted, please help!

Hi All

I'm using a pentium 3 Laptop with a ESS soundcard. I've recently installed
XP Pro, and since then the sound has become very distorted. I know it's a
driver problem but and I have the latest drivers installed. The queer thing
is that if I shut the laptop down and restart it straight away the sound is
perfect. Until the next time I fire it up again, so to put it in a nutshell
I have to fire it up twice in succession to get it to sound right.

Any of you guys or girls come across anything like this before? And if so,
what do I have to do to fix it? Its driving me bananas!

TIA Mick

I am having similar distorted sound problems. Seems to get progressively worse the longer or more often screensaver is activated. Restart cleans it until screensaver kicks in several times and worsens it again.

WinXP fully patched/SP'd
Acer TravelMate 4200
Sound Driver: Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
Driver Date: 11/3/2006
Driver Rev: 5.10.0.5319

Started happening about 2 months ago. Around the same time I installed an HP Photoseries 3200 Printer/Scanner, although I can't necessarily specifically correlate. Sometimes when shuttingdown/restarting, I get a cannot end some HPxxxtrac or something program.

Scanned with Spybot, Adaware and Avast AV last week, all clean. Running ZoneAlarm Firewall.

TIA,

jpf