windows sound service crash

[wookimonsta]

everytime i start windows, after a few minutes at least, i get the message that win32 generic host processes has crashed.
nothing seems to happen however, until a few minutes later my sound always disappears. this can of course be easily fixed by restarting my windows audio service, but its starting to be a real pain in the *** and i was wondering if anyone had similar problems at any point in the past and knew how to fix this.

i am using an onboard realtek soundcard that works fine in every other way (cept for being shite of course).
also, since this has happened, i can't set the audio in bf2 to hardware anymore, since after a while everything becomes extremely loud. all the sounds keep adding up.