WOW! a newbie who's done his homework! I'm impressed!
OK, MC4 is a very high level piece of software even tho it cost less than $50, so recording in MC and recording in Goldwave are not nearly the same thing.
you've got a few things working against you.
first, your video card. your video card is an onboard chip on your motherboard which shares your RAM instead of having its own dedicated memory. I know this because you listed your RAM as 448M instead of 512M. typically that means it's allotted that 64M to the video card and it's unaccessible to other programs. a dedicated video card with at least 64M of its own memory is my recommendation if you can afford it. what you have might work for now, but it's a consideration for you.
448M left is above the MINIMUM requirement for MC4 (256M), but I think they're assessment of minimum RAM is low. It takes 256M just to run WinXP, then everything else starts using Virtual RAM - which basically means it starts writing it to your hard drive and that causes major problems when trying to record audio. your RAM MIGHT be OK for now, but I'd consider an upgrade if you can sometime in the future.
realtek onboard sound card =
can we get it to work? maybe. most can get it to work, but some cannot. the realtek is actually a chip on the motherboard which also shares resources with the CPU and it is not designed for multitrack recording. an upgrade should be in your future for this if you can afford it. here are some recommendations for sound cards when you get that far:
http://homerecording.beaglesound.com/9.html Ok, so lets try to work with what you've got and get you going for now knowing what you're up against...
go to:
OPTIONS>AUDIO>ADVANCED
change the DRIVER MODE to MME
close MC
restart MC
let the wave profiler run
see if your problem still exists.
if it does, go back to:
OPTIONS>AUDIO>ADVANCED
and move the latency slider all the way to the SAFE side
then try your recording/playback again.
if that doesn't work there's another trick we can try, but you might be hosed.
hope that helps!!
welcome to the forum and the money pit!!!