Description of problem: With a standard RH9 installation on nforce2 board (not mine, I am afraid), which is using i810_audio sound driver, one can clearly hear nasty sound "stutter" artifacts on occasions like opening a new window on a desktop or even switching between two, mostly empty, tabs in a gnome-terminal window. This is with 2.4.20-13.9 kernel.
I did more testing on a diffrent harwdare. With Cambridge I can easily totally stop a sound from 'kmidi' by moving around some other window and I can prevent kmidi from playing as long as I want to. On the same hardware in RH 7.3 installation I can cause some distortions in 'kmidi' by moving vigorously some window around but stopping sound is really not possible.
It seems the only way to fix this is to use the full nvidia audio facilities, which Nvidia at the moment haven't released documentation too
In a comment I added later I describe a severe sound problem on a hardware which has _nothing_ to do with Nvidia, and where an older distribution while not perfect is certainly workable as opposed to the current state. This "other hardware" has via82cxxx sound card and VIA KX133 mother board. C.f. remarks about stopping sound, totally, by moving a window around.
The VIA one I'm pretty sure is scheduler related and that one is already elsewhere in bugzilla so I'll close this one again if that is ok. I had missed the fact the other comment wasnt about the nv audio
If this is a duplicate then, sure, consolidation is fine. But I do think that this is a scheduler, even if I did not write down such guesses, :-) and nvidia hardware was coincidental in the initial report. I just happened to run into the problem a big way for the first time there.