About 3 out of 4 times when I try to either play a clip in the timeline, or load an audio clip into the source veiwer, Premiere makes a soft "whoosh" or sighing sound, and completely locks up. When this happens, ALL sound on my computer goes dead. I can't play audio from any other program or source. Usually, Premiere let's me start interacting with it again after 5-10 seconds, and sound generally comes back after 30-60 seconds, but the issue happens again as soon as I try to do anything with my project, and sometimes it requires a hard reset to fix.
This has made editing nearly impossible. I've been editing video professionally for about 2.5 years, but I'm completely self taught and new to premiere, and I don't know if there's something small and basic I'm totally ignorant of that would fix this.
I'm running CS6 on a PC with...
Windows 7 64 bit
Phenom II X4 965
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium
8 gig RAM
Plenty of hard drive space
No other open programs
Radeon HD7950 (I know Premiere can't use it).