Which PCI slot did you put the Audigy 2 in? With most AMD based chipsets (at least VIA based) there are four physical interrupt lines (A,B,C,D). These are shared among devices. I don't know if your Intel based board is the same or not. Anyway, certain slots share with other slots. The one closest to the vid card usually shares with AGP (not the one that can be used in place of AGP, that is Slot 1, this is Slot 2.) Other slots might share with one another, the USB ports, onboard sound (if available), or IDE. So the solution to stutters or crashes is sometimes to change the PCI slot for the soundcard. This happened a lot a few years back, not sure how much it applies anymore. (I got burned by this myself although it was a different PCI device that was sharing, rather than sound. At least it was easy to fix!)

OK, other stuff: uninstall/reinstall sound drivers, ditto for vid drivers. If you have upgraded DX, it is not uncommon to need to reinstall vid drivers. Why? I don't know, but it works sometimes.

You might also try turning sound acceleration down in Windows. This is often used to get Soundblaster stuff to behave.

Some Audigy owners might know what sort of sound config works best. It used to be with Soundblasters that you did a "driver only" install, skip all the controls and what not because they gave trouble. Don't know if that is even possible anymore.

One other thing that I've had trouble with is some of the Windows multi-language support. When I had it installed it made a mess of games if I loaded Internet Explorer before playing (very similar to the pauses you get--and also crashes.) It also made IE really slow to scroll, etc. It was a massively bugged application and would not unload when IE was closed. It also did not have a delete feature, so I hunted down the .exe and deleted it manually. If I didn't run IE first it was fine. Deleting the internat.exe (think that was the name) did the trick permanently. This was on Win98SE, don't know if it ever happens with XP. IE6 has some nasty bugs that screw up Win98SE (effecting Wordpad, IE6, and even large directory deletions.)

You might also have some process running that is polling periodically in the background. I had a problem with a removeable CD Burner years ago that did that every 30 seconds or so. I'm not a Windows XP expert, but there are sites on the web describing how to pick and choose what processes to run.

Good luck!