choppy sound on xp x-fi

i just installed soundblaster x-fi extreme audio on a windows xp platform, and there is really choppy and laggy sound coming from my speakers. i fully updated the drivers anyone have any ideas?
edit: i noticed the sound most becomes choppy when another process is opening up or running in the background that is taking up a large amount of ram. for example, if I'm listening to music and i open up a program, the sound becomes really choppy and starts to lag with the opening of the program.

What does the rest of your system look like? Hardware-wise.

1024 ram, 80 gb hard drive, asus mobo with a p4 2.4 ghz cpu. i dont know what my graphic card is. some 128 mb nvidia. i dont see why this even matters