Sound Stuttering Out of the Box!

My wife and I purchased an Acer Aspire One D250 the other day, and right out of the box the sound stuttered. I'm under the impression that it's a hard drive problem, but I'm not an expert. I tried to exchange this one for another at Target, but they were out, and we'd love to be able to use this one on an upcoming trip. So, here's a more detailed rundown of the problem:

Every sound--from the start-up sound through every system sound and audio clip to the shutdown music--stutters. How badly it stutters seems to depend on system load or possibly heat, but it ALWAYS stutters at least a little. I didn't do anything to it before it started doing this, so I assume it was doing this when it got its install. Either that, or some douche at Target dropped it on the ground. At any rate, since the computer seems to function well enough other than the sound, I'm reluctant to call it a hardware problem, but it's systemic enough that it doesn't really seem like a "software" problem, either.

I've done some extensive web searching, and a few things I've come across include:

• DMA reverting to PIO
  Audio Driver Problems

The symptoms seem to closely match the DMA reverting to PIO problem, except for the fact that the computer is setup to run the hard drive on SATA, and it's in DMA mode anyway. As for the audio driver, I've uninstalled and reinstalled the relevant drivers, and it hasn't fixed the problem.

Another note that might help is that I did switch the settings to have the hard drive run on IDE just to see what would happen, and the sound problem got WAY worse til I switched it back.

Oh, and I'm running Windows XP on a mechanical hard drive model, so you know.

Sorry to ramble, but hopefully I've included enough info to get started.