After troubleshooting what has got to be one of the most tiring and lengthy troubleshooting experiences I’ve ever had to deal with, I have finally narrowed down where the problem exists. MalwareBytes AntiMalware Web Site Blocking.
Now, to give some background on the issue. Every so often I’d hear pops and other forms of audio glitches in my audio while playing music on my computer. So I opened a tool called DPC Latency Checker and yep, DPC latency spikes were everywhere. And you know what, those audio glitches would appear right when a bunch of those DPC latency spikes occured. So I closed that program and opened LatencyMon and the number one culprit for DPC Latency Spikes was NDIS.SYS. So I was looking around the Internet and someone started mentioning in another forum about restarting the “Base Filtering Engine” service which one of the dependencies was the Windows Firewall Service.
I executed the following…
net stop "Base Filtering Engine" /Yes net start "Base Filtering Engine"
Yay, no more DPC latency spikes and no more audio glitches either. Problem is that running without the Windows Firewall isn’t a recommended thing to do. So I started doing some more research into the issue, specifically I Googled for “windows firewall high dpc” and one of the things that it linked to was a page that stated someone had MalwareBytes AntiMalware installed, the pro version to be specific.
Well, knowing that I didn’t want to uninstall it I began to think about what component of MalwareBytes hooks into the Windows Firewall. Website Blocking!
I unchecked those options in MalwareBytes and EUREKA! No more DPC latency spikes and no more audio glitches!
So if you’re one of the few that seem to having this issue with MalwareBytes AntiMalware installed and you’re hearing glitches in your audio, try disabling Web Site Blocking in the Protection tab of MalwareBytes AntiMalware. Note, you don’t have to uninstall MalwareBytes AntiMalware, just disable this small portion of the program and you’ll no longer be hearing these audio glitches and you’ll once again have perfect sound.