i think i've isolated the problem.

what i'm noticing is that if i cycle the mixer, it sounds good for about a second before it clicks into some weird tone. and i've noticed that disconnecting from the internet seems to make a difference. the mixer connects via firewire, so it's possibly a bandwidth thing.

a few weeks ago, when i was trying to get html5 to read flac natively through an ogg container [i was a little confused about how that works], i installed some codecs. i then uninstalled the codecs. but, they left some windows media files sitting on my hard drive - including some drm files and some network files.

i set this pc up to completely wipe out windows media. in hindsight, that codec install was actually somewhat foolish, as it undid something i spent months doing back in 2007. i could always reinstall - the wipe process is worked into the install - but i'm hoping i can do this manually.