Speaker crackling with text to speech.

Hi all!
I hope I am in the right place .I have read through most of the the postings and have not found my particular problem.
I have an aao 3cell with xp factory loaded.(lucked out with a 160gig hrd drive)
I am having a problem with text to speech being distorted and and sounding scratchy like it might do if a speaker wire were loose.

I don't think it is a loose connection as the problem persists even with earphones plugged into the jack! Also to confound things a bit more Music and audio/streaming video ,movies etc. have no problems or distortions.I have NEVER maxed out or over driven the speakers.

It only produces the problem with text to speech.It does it with microsoft text to speech as well as the speaking directions from Delorme road atlas 2007.It is a very annoying crackling along with the sythasized speech.

I did call acer about this and spoke to a very nice but useless script jocky that told me it was a micrsoft problem and to contact them.Odd that it also has the problem with a non microsoft product.Also I have two other AAO that do not have any problems with text to speech or voice synthesis.
Three different machines all the same software only one produces the problem?


Any ideas? I think it is the sound card but can't explain why it only does it with text to speech.

Driver problem?

I would be very disappointed if it was a hardware problem.I just returned an AAO with a bad fan and the one I'm having the problem with has a nice cool quiet fan.When the other unit failed it sounded like a a tiny blender crushing ice....I digress.

Thanks in advance with any ideas!