I've had a similar issue with the stutter, snap, crackle and pop. Not in Windows 7, but in XP with an Nforce board of some kind and a M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card. Ultimately, the solution was a different motherboard altogether.
The issues I had would only happen during HDD activity, which inherently meant anytime I played audio that was read from my HD and not over the network. So, the workaround was to play the audio from a network source. I think it still had issues during heavy I/O on the HD regardless of source.
The exception to all of the above is when I was in Linux. I had zero issues in Linux. No stuttering or popping or crackling or snapping. With all the same original hardware. No matter how much HD activity.
Obviously, as this is a laptop it'll be a bit tricky to replace the motherboard with a different one altogether, but you could try tweaking some of the settings and drivers related to the storage subsystem.
And are you sure you never had this issue before with XP, Vista or whatever was on the laptop before you installed 7 RTM?