Launching Audacity crashes all other audio

[silhouettes1]

If I have been using my computer and launch Audacity it causes all of the audio on my computer (playing through winamp, itunes etc or on the internet) to warp and become very slow and down-pitched. It will stay like that until I restart my computer. After I have restarted the computer, if I launch Audacity before using anything else it will work. It only seems to work if it is the first thing launched.

Any idea why this is happening or how I can keep it from continuing to happen?

Thank you.