Problems with an SiS 7018 and moderate - heavy system load

Hi there. I'm running XMMS 1.2.7 on Linux 2.4.20 (even though my problem
spans various versions of both) and whenever I do things like "tar zxf
blah.tar.gz" or (especially) "tar jxf blah.tar.bz2", my sound begins to
get staticy and then just goes dead. (/me puts on flamesuit) I've even
run it as root and the same thing happens. I've noticed it's much worse
using the OSS output device than it is when I use the eSound output
plugin. 

Any ideas what the problem is, or has anyone else with this card
experienced this problem? Thanks in advance for all help.
-- 
Christopher Nehren <[email protected]>