An interesting fact about the audiodg.exe process (Windows Audio Device
Graph Isolation), is that it runs with normal CPU priority. My experience
with multimedia tells me that multimedia threads should be using High or
Real-time priority. What happens when I simply open Tasks Manager on the
Processes page, is that the audio playback starts dropping packets of
samples. Consider all that is running is the Task Manager and some MP3
player (could be Windows Media Player; MPlayer or whatever you like).

Unfortunately that process is isolated and protected, so I'm not allowed to
change it's CPU scheduling priority. Does anyone knows how to take over an
isolated process? I'll ask uncle Google :-)

I wonder if there is a way to remove this process, and playback audio
without it? just sits there killing the audio performance. Perhaps it's also
protecting the audio chain from users and programs?