USB addon card causing audio artifacts

[Gurck]

I bought a card reader about two weeks back, and for some reason unbeknownst to me it fried my motherboard's USB pinouts. I know for a fact that it was hooked up correctly. Anyway, I snagged a USB card from Newegg and installed it, everything's flawless, the card reader works great now, etc. Then I started up foobar and ... Audio now has artifacts in it - frequent, very low duration, high pitched beeps and frequent popping as well. This is through an Audigy 2 ZS Plat. Any ideas?

Edit - seems like it might be interference, I moved the card up a slot and the problem is ~90-95% better, but I still get an occasional beep or pop, which sucks If I moved it up one more slot though, it'd be right next to my video card - as it is it's closer than I'd like. I don't have much room to work with, five PCI slots and 3 cards. Sound card on the bottom, tv tuner right above it, empty, usb card, empty, agp slot. Very bottom pci slot is some kind of Asus proprietary blue slot, I don't want to F with it. Is there any way I could rig up some ghetto shielding for the offending card?

 

[Gurck]

Should I RMA it? The thing is, it's performing its function properly, other than the sound problem.

 

[Gurck]

Well I've played around with it some more and noticed a few things.. increasing the buffer in my music player seems to help, got this idea from someone who claimed to have a similar problem when opening applications (this was more or less constant, but worse when I was opening apps). That's the :thumbsup:, but the :thumbsdown: is that when I'm uploading something it gets really bad, foobar actually stops playing whatever I was listening to and I get beeps and pops when I type. Further, I get noticeable mouse lag when uploading. Could this be an issue with my onbaord NIC? Any ideas are really appreciated.