4 hours later... finally fixed my choppy sound. it was pulse audio all along and the way it schedules with the cpu
i tried editing
/etc/pulse/default.pa to change
load-module module-hal-detect
to
load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0
and that did not change a thing

finally i said screw it and went to system > pref > hardware > audio and changed the primary sound driver on EVERYTHING to OSS and poof!
think im going to try this new command in the morning:
yum -y remove pulseaudionow, off to figure out why i can mount, but not access my NFS share on my server 2008 box from linux

whew... more results to come!