Unless your HD is extremely slow it's not the cause of your problems I suspect (although a 2nd HD is HIGHLY recommended for any intense audio or tracking work).
My first guess about your crackles would be an IRQ conflict. There's 2 levels to checking your irq's--hardware and bios.
On the hardware level most PCI slots share irq's with at least 1 other device on the motherboard. You'll have to refer to the manuals for your Soltek board to see what slots share with what devices. Try to pick a slot that shares irq's with something you can disable completely (serial/parallel ports, onboard sound etc.) AVOID any slot that shares irq with graphics card, IDE controllers and/or network card (note that you may simply be sharing with another pci slot that has a network card installed, etc).
On the software side it should be pretty easy to get Win 98 to accept the irq's you want items to have once you've done a bit of PCI slot shuffling. Under (NT) 2k & Xp sometimes the 'PLug n Pray' features of the OS will remap irq's and mem addresses of cards to values it feels are better, delving into the properties of objects in your device manager and choosing any configuration other than 0000 can help solve this, but normally this isn't necessary.
Beyond easily resolved addressing conflicts... seeing that you have a VIA chipset I'd recommend digging through the MANY pages in the troubleshooting section here and read the threads on VIA chipset issues. Some users seem to be able to achieve a level of stability with their VIA systems, others give in and buy an Intel chipset. You can likely eliminate your crackling issues, but I suspect you'll eventually run into the dreaded PCI errors regardless of how much tweaking you do unless you avoid reverbs delays & sampling on teh pulsar entirely.
Also moving to Win2k or XP is certainly a good idea since you've got a very modern cpu there and most vendors today are discontinuing support of other MS OS's. As long as you have 256-512 MB ram you can't lose much beyond the time it takes to set it all up and figure it out.
If you'd rather stay on win98 i'd recommend 98se and a copy of 98lite to clean it up.
http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... &forum=3&6
If you DO decide to switch to 2k/xp then head over to
http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... forum=3&66 to get your tweak on. (note that disabling ACPI may not be necessary under xp--but with a VIA chipset it's still recommended).
If, in the long run, you decide to get an Intel chipset, come back here and you'll get some excellent recommendations for your creamware gear i'm sure.
