Can't play MP3s

Hello to all, and really, a lot of thanks to all ahead of time who take the
time with resect to this problem. It is quite the serious one, and I have
no idea how to go about solving it, or even what could be causing it. I'll
try to be very descriptive...for more details just ask:

The Problem: I can't play MP3s clearly on ANY player, including winamp 2,
2.09, 2,9, 3, Windows Media Player, or RealPlayer. As a matter of fact I
get bad quality on avi's as well, divx inclusive. What I mean by clearly is
that if I'm playing a song lets say, the music is loud and clear, but the
singers lyrics can hardly be heard. Basically, the song sounds as if it
were recorded in a church where the echo would drown out any words in the
song, and actually, this echo is there. It sounds really weird, and I must
admit it's very hard to describe.

The System: Pentium 200 Mhz, yes its old, but all worked fine 1 month ago
(I've posted with regards to this problem before, but then when I thought it
wen't away, it's back now...fresh after an all complete system reinstall),
32 megs or RAM. Like I said, it played mp3's fine 1 month ago, and I have a
Pentium 133Mhz with 16 megs or RAM playes MP3s just fine!

Actions taken up to now: as I stated, this problem occured before, and then
went away again. It was suggested by a few that this problem could be
caused by add-ware shipped with kazaa. When the problem again came back (2
days ago), I finally decided to re-format the entire system (fdisk, format
...the whole nine yards), then installed win95 and win 98 (clean and from
scratch). After getting win98 installed on the system, I installed the
basic drivers for sound card, network adapter, video driver, and then tried
winamp. And to my complete surprise, the same thing happens, the song/audio
file, etc.. playes really strange, with a sort of echo in the background
with the lyrics drown out by the instrmentals (almost as if the "lyric
layer" was decreased in volume while the "song layer" was increased in
volume - if that's making any sense). Then I tried Windows Media Player
6.4, and the exact same thing occurs, can't play avi's, mp3... (didn't try
other compressed audio formats). It does play cd's, but that of course is
no surprise as playing cd format cd's isn't all that difficult for a cd-rom.
I should also mention that when I play these songs on any player, my
processor activity does not rise above 5%, thus eliminating the possibility
that the old pentium is having problems keeping up with the decompression.
Also, I was suspecting the sound card, but as already mentioned, I can play
cd's just fine...

Well, that's all I can think of which seems relevent for the time being...
.

Doug