Audio/sound lag problem

Anyone know what could cause sound/audio choppyness and lag? Whenever I start music or a video the task manager shows the CPU usage jumping to 70-98%. Its never done that before, and not sure what else to do. I've ran countless virus and spyware scans, I've defragged my computer, I've ran disk cleanup along with error checking, I've deleted some programs that take up alot of space, and I even went into msconfig and stopped some services and startup programs. Now my computer is acting fast as hell but when I start playing a video or music the CPU usage still jumps up. Any chance someone could help me figure this out? :(

What media player program are you using?

Well, its when I use WMP is when it jumps to 90%, youtube brings it up to 50%, just recently used a myspace player for some music and it brought it up to 70% :( Its pretty much all sounds that lag :( even when using programs like Ventrilo.

Check for viruses, update your sound drivers. If that doesn't help...who knows.

Already ran multiple scans for spyware and viruses. And bare with me since I'm not the most computer smart person alive, but I'm pretty sure I'm using onboard sound, not sure if those need driver updates >_>

Of course they do. Any sound card, built-in or not, has drivers.
Find out who the chip's manufacturer is and download the latest driver for that built-in sound codec model.

Not exactly sure how to go about doin' that >_<, getting the chips manufacturer and all.

Youtube uses an encoding called H.264, it's very computationally expensive so 50&#37; sounds right. WMP isn't set up for that so H.264 movies might be even higher there, if those are the types of files that you are watching, then use Quicktime.

What is the extension on the video that you are watching... WMV, AVI, MPG, MP4? If you encoded them with iSquint than the lag is a bug in the software. They are encoding the movie at 29.95 frames per second and the audio at 30fps. I've emailed the programmers twice and each release still has this bug.

Ok, this is enraging me to no end, I've even downloaded new drivers. NOTHING is working. Its absolutely horriblt when I try to play wmv the most. It goes for 10 seconds and the picture stops and skips 5 times and then goes back to normal, rinse repeat.

I'm not sure if its my sound device or video card now.