Follow-up - Playing music severely degrades network transfer performance in Vista

This is a follow-up to "Playing music severely degrades network transfer performance in Vista" which I posted earlier.

I wan banking that this problem would come down to a single application such as Windows Media Player, but alas the problem seems a lot deeper than that.  Over at the PC Doc HQ we've been able to replicate a similar network performance drop when playing audio using Windows Media Player 11, iTunes and Real Player (these results are from a different machine to the one we tried earlier):

Video also has the same effect.  Here's the effect that playing random video files using Windows Media Center, Hauppauge Win TV and Nero ShowTime has on network performance:

Also, bad news for gamers.  This bug also seriously impacts network performance when gaming.  I'm seeing a 50% drop in network performance when games such as Oblivion are running.

I wish it ended there.   It's not just music that kills the network transfer speeds, any sound emitted by your system while transferring data seems to have this effect.  Every *ding*. every *donk*, every wok being hit by a spoon, every bit of discordant piano has the effect of flatlining network transfers briefly.  Here's what happened when I encourages my system to generate an Asterisk sound while transferring a file:

Recording audio also seems to have a similar effect, even if there's no mic connected to the system: 

And the same effect is present when playing a video file that doesn't contain an audio track (the ups and downs in transfer speed prior to the drop are caused by Adobe Premiere rendering the video):

Oh, and in case you're wondering, no, the problem doesn't seem to exist under XP:

Until this bug is fixed I'm switching off sounds on Vista and keeping all other noise to a minimum.