I am concerned about the vulnerability of timers to being delayed by background processing. (In the mid nineties, writing real-time programs in C under DOS, we found that interrupts could be held at bay for up to a third of a second, occasionally, due to background disk operations. That was old software on old hardware.) Currently, I find occasional glitches in a simple ~ 1.1 second timer playing a short audio click, or similar (so far, always at start-up). This involves layers of VB6 as well as the windows system (Win2000), of which I have little knowledge. I have two questions:

1. Roughly, what can be said about the sources of lack of reliability/accuracy of timers in logic using VB6 timers?

2. Are there timing/timer functions in DirectX that would be more reliable?

Thanks in advance,
Jim