Ethernet streaming and occasional white noise on Windows

[Confused]

I spent an interesting morning trying to test AIR 2.1.4-beta1 to destruction. I was up early this morning, and set JRiver up with a large 24 bit playlist. Screensaver now disabled. The system ran without white noise from 5:55am to 10:25am. So that was about 4.5 hours stable running at 24bit WASAPI, only interrupted by myself in the end, not white noise. To be honest, I was not listening through this entire period. (1 shower, 1 quick visit to local shop) However, when I was listening there were no issues, no glitches, nothing. I then tried running what is my least stable way of using AIR, that is with iTunes running 16/44.1 material, PC soundcard and AIR GUI settings both at 24/192. Yes, I know this is not sensible from an optimum sound quality point of view, but in the past this is a set up that gives fairly random white noise, I was trying to see if with the screensaver disabled would AIR 2.1.4-beta1 be stable even in this condition. It then ran without issues until 11:15am, then a short burst of white noise, then OK until white noise at 12:06pm, 12:10pm, 12:16pm. In each case short bursts. (A clear demonstration of @AlexS' statement that once you get white noise you should reboot, as one event plants the seed for many more. The PC was not rebooted during this test.

So with that done, my next plan is to try with the anti virus off per AlexS' and Thumb5's posts above. This will have to wait a few days due to festive season distractions!