looses microphone when load goes up

[Evuraan]

greetings y'all.!

I've a strange problem with a rather frail host running Ubuntu 8.04.2
(P4/1.5G Ram) with a normal (ie, non-usb) microphone -

the microphone suddenly stops working  if the load on the machine goes
up - the machine needs to be bounced to fix this.

For instance, the user could be talking on skype, and if  any heavy
%pcpu thing  is spawned (apt-get upgrade, ffmpeg, firefox or anything
of this sort) the other end can no longer hear anything thru the
microphone. as hinted earlier, a reboot fixes this. well, until the
load avg raises again.

this has nothing to do with the popular pulseaudio/alsa, I think - as
the problem was always the mic going mute.

if it helps, here's the o/p of alsa-info.sh:
http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=fdbf506d78520554cef9a6c4fc386e593453e9e8

has anybody seen this sort of issue before? any feedback would be much
appreciated. thx.!