Choppy sound in Windows 7 and Realtek audio when playing music - after resuming from sleep

**For those who have this problem and want to see if this solves it for you too:**Click your start orb, type "services", press enter, find and restart the "Microsoft Antimalware Service".  Turn real-time protection back on if it's still off and was on before.  Check your sound, and it should be fixed!

Vincent,

Thank you very much for the suggestions!  Finally some helpful guidance!

I used DCP Latency Checker and was receiving peaks of 27,000 when it started to get choppy, 50,000 when it was pretty choppy, and really bad it was peaking at about 75,000-80,000.

When not skipping and everything sounds great, like after a reboot, the peak doesn't even go above 500 (if so, rarely, and hardly any higher).

I know hardware resources wasn't my limitation, as I'm running 8 logical 3ghz cores and have 6GB of high speed triple channel memory with at least 50% available most of the time.  When bad audio drop outs were occurring, I confirmed this (0-3% cpu usage and 3+ GB of physical memory available, even with my page file disabled to increase performance).

While the DCP Latency Checker was all in the red (high values), I started going through my running services and restarting, one by one.  Then I got to "Base Filtering Engine", which has a description of: "The Base Filtering Engine (BFE) is a service that manages firewall and Internet Protocol security (IPsec) policies and implements user mode filtering. Stopping or disabling the BFE service will significantly reduce the security of the system. It will also result in unpredictable behavior in IPsec management and firewall applications."  I proceeded to try to restart it, which popped up a message saying 3 other services would also need to restart in order to restart it: IPsec Policy Agent, Windows Firewall, and Microsoft Malware Protection Network Driver.  I clicked "yes" to restart all of them, and after a few seconds windows tells me "Windows could not stop the Base Filtering Engine service on Local Computer.  Error 1051: A stop control has been sent to a service that other running services are dependent on."  So I click Ok, and I look in the DCP checker program, and my latencies are all still red and reading way too high.  At this point, windows firewall is disabled, all other 3 services are running though.  So I try to restart it again, and it succeeds.  Instantly, my DCP checker levels are back in the green and low numbers (<500) and all audio skipping has stopped. I'm still not sure which service it is, since it could be any of these 3:

1. Base Filtering Engine
2. IPsec Policy Agent
3. Microsoft Malware Protection Network Driver

Update:   Now that my sound was off again I got to do more debugging, but I don't even see the third one listed anywhere in services, neither on nor off, but restarting IPsec Policy Agent did nothing.  I restarted Microsoft Antimalware Service since it was the only one that sounded related to #3 above, and that did the trick, DCP levels dropped instantly and no more dropouts.  I'm still doing the same thing every other day or so, or sometimes once a day (depending on how much I use my audio...? possibly?)

So, does it make sense that this service would be causing problems?  This means it isn't a driver issue--correct?  If it's not a Realtek driver issue then it's microsoft's issue and needs to be fixed--it's their service and software that seem to be causing the issue/conflicting with the driver.  I guess it could be either one's problem, but both realtek and microsoft can fix it if they want to!  It would be nice to not have to do this almost every day just to use the sound

Thanks again Vincent!