Sound driver question

A puzzling audio problem on one of my laptops: I noticed the windows sound
events all sounded lower in pitch than normal (guessing about 3% or 4%
lower)
on this Dell e6500 laptop. So I copied some of the sound events over to a
temp
folder, and played them using various wav players, and sure enough, they
all sound lower in pitch (with the exception of one wav player, which
renders
the pitch correctly). I think I have finally noticed one thing unique about
this: these windows event sounds are mostly 22.05 kHz, 16 bit wave files,
not the
standard 44.1 kHz. Sitll, they should all play with the correct pitch!

I've got the up-to-date IDT audio driver, so that's apparently not the
issue.
This Dell e6500 uses a IDT High Definition Audio Codec (whether I like it or
not). I was hoping to find some other alternative audio codec that might
work
better (assuming that codec is related to this problem), but I haven't found
any alternative (on the Dell drivers site, and they are all listed there).

How this can happen is puzzling to me, however, and short of getting some
alternative audio driver(s), I don't see an obvious solution, unless I'm
missing
something. It's not the end of the world, but I'd sure like to know if I
can
rectify it, or if someone has some suggestions. As I said, everything is
hunky dory in Device Manager and all drivers are up to date. What is also
interesting is that one really simple player (called Billy Player) plays the
pitch correctly, but the others do not.

Maybe it means there is some overhead in decoding non 44.1 kHz audio files
on this system, causing some latency? But that just seems too far out to
me. Besides which, Billy Player says it's using the IDT audio and it plays
it correctly.

Any ideas? TIA.