After setting up a new workstation at work with Windows Server 2003 x64 I discovered an annoying problem that was hard to live with and wound up being harder to solve than I expected.

For work, I often view alot of MSDN video and webcasts.  The problem I was having was distorted audio during playback of these webcasts.  Other MP3 or YouTube sources were problem free.  The distorted audio was distracting and very annoying, but you could still hear the audio, which for these webcasts was typically just voice audio for the webcast presentation.  Because the other audio sources were problem free, I initially thought that the audio for these webcasts was just poor quality, and I lived with it for a while, until I tested one at home, and found that the audio was perfectly fine at home.  This caused me to investigate further, and for some reason finding a solution was much more difficult than I think it should have been. 

Maybe the patch had just been released at that point and not indexed by google yet, I'm not sure.  I was very glad to find a fix though.

Anyway, the fix is available from Microsoft and cures a problem with audio that has been encoded using the Windows Media Audio Voice 9 codec, which was the case with many of the MSDN webcasts.

The fix can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940666