On 28 Aug 2006 04:25:02 -0700, meow2222@care2.com wrote:


>The short version is I've had it happen on 2 machines, a P1 and a
>celeron.

A p1 may indeed be marginal if not insufficient (depending
on speed and whether MMX & player using it). Any celeron
besides the L2-cacheless 300MHz version is fast enough for
MP3, let alone lesser compressed formats.


>All tasks are at normal priority, including taskman, except
>the player audio which is at real-time priority.

Are you 100% certain the audio player was at realtime
priority? If it was, this is a very severe defect in the
software, there is no audio player that should EVER be at
realtime priority. I'm talking lawsuit-serious, it should
never be released into the market as it will guarantee
problems.

So take any random audio player, actually all of them except
this one you think might be at realtime priority, and it
should not do as you described.


>This is default
>settings. Once the audio player runs out of enough CPU to do all the
>tasks it needs to do it just loops.

Either:

A) The system had enough CPU power for the audio regardless
of anything else or;

B) It didn't.

If it did, realtime priority didn't cause it from lack of
CPU, it caused it because the background OS functions
weren't working as they should. In short, no application
running should have realtime priority. Abandon such
software and demand money back if it wasn't free.


>CPU sits at 100%, presumably due to
>some unstable process somewhere.


>Getting the PC out of the looping
>audio doesnt happen because the looping audio has higher priority than
>taskman, and theres no CPU cycles to spare.

Your problem has nothing to do with CPU or audio, the
operating system itself was malfunctioning and would have
done so just the same had it been some other thing being
done besides audio.


>just enough CPU
>available to refresh the CPU use graph slowly. The player in both cases
>was winamp.

Which version?

Again, a Pentium 200MMX, Celeron 300A or better can play MP3
or other audio formats without what you describe. Most
certainly anything that came thereafter can.

It is just not even slightly likely that OP has anything
resembling what you have described.