Skyrim hardlocking system

[Xescream]

Ok, my skyrim worked fine, with few crashes (only on rare bugs and after playing for more than 3 hours, not a big deal) , on high with a few tweaks. After a the first patch came out, I started getting the infamous sound glitch, but strangely enough, changing my sound quality to the recommended has not worked. I have updated all my drivers, reinstalled and tried different drivers, and all that good crap. I am on 32-bit windows professional (Its 64 bit compatible but the a**hole company I bought it from installed 32 bit and I need to get down to reinstalling sometime) with the unfortunately limited 3GB RAM, and a nvidia 9800gt 512MB. As more updates released, my sound got steadily more corrupt, and now it is to the point where it is just nasty, unintelligable crackling. This never happens with any other games, and I have played a lot of different games, although not deus ex or crysis as my computer isn't that good. The sound is very awful, and the worst part of it is, It crashes after any period between 30-90 seconds of loading in game. I have tried deleting all the files from my computer and redownloading and reinstalling (through steam, obviously) I have tried reinstalling drivers, reinstalling skyrim, tweaking all the graphics every which way. here is the strange thing though: My sound works fine when the game is not the active window! The background noise continues playing whenever I minimize the game (fullscreen) or select another window (windowed mode) without the slightest bit of distortion! I really wanna play skyrim again, so any help would be phenomenal! It stopped working upon updating to 1.4