New system freezing

Hi all,

I was trying to find a decent motherboard forum. Hoping I've come to the right place!!

I have recently setup a new system with my friend (bought the parts ourselves, installed it all ourselves). The system consists of:

Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H
2 x 2gb sticks of GEIL RAM
2 x seagate barracuda SATA hard drives
AMD AM2 Athlon 64x2 Dual Core 6400+ (3.2ghz)
Windows Professional X64 edition

Those are the main components.

I will tell you the story, originally when we installed the system we had used an Asus M2A-VM HDMI mobo, however we initially had issues with an error "USB over current" and it wouldn't load windows or get to the loading point. We were advised to check the grounding of the board, screws etc and we managed to get over this problem by bending the metal plate which goes into the case for the ports at the back. The next problem we faced was that it was freezing for no apparent reason in windows.

I took the board back and replaced it with the gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H. Once this was installed it would not power on, so I double checked the connections for the power switch etc and it all looked fine, so I thought I would unscrew a couple of the screws which attach it to the case, the unit then powered on.

Now that the power issue was sorted I loaded the drivers in windows (as you do) and all was well, until I went to click on the realtek sound manager icon in the system tray, as soon as I left-click it the whole system freezes and I have to restart via the switch. The funny thing is winamp works fine, however if I try to open up Windows Media player it does the same thing - freezes. Perhaps the realtek sound manager and WMP are linked somehow and are causing the system to freeze?

From what I can see, only the sound manager seems to be freezing (realtek), as if I go into windows volume control I am able to adjust the volume on all components.

My question is, does anyone have any suggestions on what to try next? I feel it could either be the computer case itself or something else perhaps RAM. Everything seems to work fine until you try to open WMP or realtek sound manager from the system icon. I've done a broad google search but could not find anything related.

Hoping you can help,
Matt