Sound distortion and odd buffering

Hi, I'm not sure if I'm even allowed to ask for help here, but I'll cheekily do so anyway :)

I've been using the 2.6 beta Sirocco utility with the dreaded Linksys Wireless Music Bridge (whose original software almost made me pack it all in and go to a Monastery) on two different Windows XP machines and everything now almost works perfectly. Apart from two things

1. Sound distortion. Whenever the volume level out of the device is high (whichever combination of software volume sliders is used) the resulting sound output is distorted. This is lessened if I keep the output from the device low (software volume sliders right down) and crank up my amp. Has anyone come across this before?

2. Buffering issues. Quite a lot of the time the device works perfectly, but sometimes it goes through periods where the buffer hovers at a particular level for many seconds, and then sinks down step-by-step to zero before going back up, so the sound cuts out and then comes back to life again. It makes no difference what buffer size I set.

Hope you can help!

Thanks!

Ps. Is there a new utility (post 2.6 beta) coming out?