Ok, so not to beat a dead horse, but after using wine 1.4-rc4 for a few days the crackling came back. Don't say it, I already compiled rc5 and tried it as well and it also has the crackly sound issue. As a side note I play LoL and I found that along with the crackling the normal sounds do play, but are played very quickly (including the embedded videos). Finally, there is still only one error: err:ole:CoInitializeEx Attempt to change threading model of this apartment from multi-threaded to apartment threaded Thoughts?