Tried searching and could find no one else with this problem. Occasionally when I initiate dialouge with an NPC the conversation is static filled & interrupted with loud popping sounds coming from my speakers. This only seems to happen with certain NPC's as it didn't happen in Megaton at all that I remember. It has since happened with the small boy who is running from the fire ants and the leader of the Lion Pride outside of Galaxy News Radio. The rest of my audio seems to work fine as I do not have the problem I see others having where you have to modify your surround sound setup. I am using onboard audio (Realtek driver I believe) and will try to look for updated audio drivers when I get home from work today. I am running Vista 64bit, 9800 GT, AMD Phenom x4 9850, 4G RAM. I have the game updated to the 1.7 patch. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

This is possibly caused by your NVidia drivers for your 9800 card. Weird I know !

If you are running the later 200 series drivers it causes pops and crackles during speech and id VATS mode.

The only fixes are to either upgrade the graphics card or downgrade the drivers to earlier versions. I found the 196/197 drivers to be the most suitable match for the 9800 series cards being the most stable.

B

I updated my realtek audio drivers to the latest version and have not had that problem occur again since then. Once every few playthroughs the whole game will just crash for no reason but I use the quicksave feature alot so it's not too bad. Oblivion would crash like this too so I guess it just comes with the territory of their awesome games.