We just upgraded our computer system at work (at a newspaper). We now have
PowerMac G5's running OSX Panther 10.3.8. We've been up and running for a
week, have had a few bugs but we're picking 'em off one at a time and
getting things dialed in.

While I work, I like to listen to MP3s of music and old radio shows, which I
drag to a folder on my computer and have been using I-Tunes to play since
the system upgrade. Everything up until now has been wonderful, not a bit of
problem with the audio in I-Tunes or any other application.

When I left work Monday night, everything was fine. I didn't work Tuesday,
my machine was asleep all day ... FYI, I did leave the I-Tunes application
up by mistake, I normally close out all programs before putting my machine
to sleep but I'm still getting used to the dock and didn't notice that this
was still up.

When I came back to work Wednesday, I woke my machine up ... here's another
FYI, it immediately started trying to download two updates, first Security
Update 2005-002 and then OSX 10.3.9; I don't know why it did that coming out
of sleep but it did; and this may have been a mistake on my part but I
stopped the update because it was a huge update even with our rather quick
T-1 line at work, and I needed to get to work and didn't need my machine
bogged down trying to download something, I figured I could do it later.

Anyway, I then tried to play an audio file ... and got nothing but scratchy
static and white noise. It doesn't just do that with I-Tunes, it does it
with every concievable audio application, including the alert sounds. And
nothing I did made it better. I tried trashing the sound preferences and
restarting. I checked all my speaker connections. I checked all the settings
in the systems configuration. I launched GarageBand which was recommended as
a fix to audio problems at one Web site I saw, and that didn't work, in fact
it made worse white noise than anything else. Nothing helped. The audio is
completely trashed.

Does anyone have a clue what might be going on here, and how I might be able
to fix it?

Thanks in advance for any help.