Since there's been no answer, I did a little digging around myself:
http://support.creative.com/kb/show....aspx?sid=46913
In the end, I turned down the hardware acceleration on my sound card 1 notch and that fixed (or more specifically, disabled EAX options) for me. It's a temporary solution until I feel more confident about messing with bios settings and trying to figure out what dark ritual created the inner workings of my computer (need to get a hold of Dell support and find out why just about everything is listed on a pci bus).