The computer is a Hp pavilion 540n 1.6 Ghz pentium 4, XP operating system, 768 Mb ram, Maxtor 60 Gb harddrive/30 Gb free space. ATI Radeon 9600 XT graphic card.

The problem I am having is the computer freezes/pauses about every 20 secnods, stays that way for a couple seconds this happens whether I am in a program or not, or when the computer is turning on or off. Also the sound is extrmely distorted and scratchy. Iv noticed that the sound problem doesnt start until the computer freezes the first time while the sound is playing. For example I can play a song and it sounds fine until the computer freezes up and when it starts up again the sound is distorted.
These problems started up the day I installed a samsung 712N monitor, the driver disk was bent out of shape so I had to download the drivers from samsung.com. I was also having a problem with lines not being smooth after the instalation fo the monitor. I didnt notice the freezing problem until I downloaded a driver for the monitor and a SiS 7012 audio driver from windows update. After I noticed the problems I checked if any of the drivers were not digitally sighned in the device manager and everything seemed ok. I uninstalled the drivers and downloaded the 7012 driver directly from the SiS website, and I reinstalled the monitor drivers, which did nothing to help. I also tried connecting the old monitor and installing all the old drivers, but nothing changed the problem. Thank you for your time, let me know if there is anything that I can do that might fix this problem, its making the computer impossible to work with.

sounds like it could be a driver conflict? have you checked the device manager to see if windows xp has noticed any conflicts? if you only noticed it from installing the driver then have you tried using a restore CD (or using the ms xp backup facility thing) and seeing if the problem clears up? (ie you have fresh windows install with NO extra drivers) surely the people who sold you the computer can replace the bent driver disk so that you have a working one? if not XP SHOULD be able to recognise it after a restore anyway as it has many many default built-in drivers for various hardware.