Yeah I mostly develop on Gentoo, though I reboot into Windows 7 when working on Windows-specific things. Audio was a little tricky to put together on both platforms so I'm not overly surprised there are issues.
Could you make a video+audio recording of the game running with the static and post it (or a link to it) here?. I can't recreate the problem so I'd like to hear what you're hearing. Also does your setup have more than two speakers/channels?
I think I know what the alt-tabbing problems are so I should be able to fix those. I can't remember if I was manually setting the icon or not, I was saving that for later. I don't even remember if I've made an icon to use yet.