Random Dropouts - issue resolved

I have been having random pops, crackles and dropouts for the past few weeks. I went through many threads in this Forum and tried most of the suggestions. Nothing helped. I ran the DPC Latency Checker almost continuously to find out why this was happening. At one time, I noticed that my Agnitum Outpost Firewall had some activity and at the same time there was a spike in Latency. After watching closely, I realized that whenever there was a spike in the Latency Checker, Audio popped or dropped in Sonar, and the Firewall was causing the spikes. Most probably, a recent update to the firewall started causing this issue. I disabled the Firewall, and everything is back to normal - no more pops or dropouts. Hope this helps someone with a similar issue..