I thought Windows had a fancy interrupt priority system that should, in principle, allow sound playback to preempt network interrupts? AMD64 added a fancy feature (CR8 access to the task priority register) just to accelerate interrupt prioritization.
(This is all very vague memory. I know how this stuff works on Linux. Linux does not have interrupt priorities.)
(This is all very vague memory. I know how this stuff works on Linux. Linux does not have interrupt priorities.)