Double speed sound

[dmorin at lear.morinfamily.com (Duane Morin)]

I usually don't play mp3s on my laptop but today I fired one up...and 
discovered that it seems to be playing at rapid speed, like chipmunks.
I'm using mplayer, and a whole bunch of sound files experienced the same 
problem.

I think I had this problem once before we exceedingly slow playback, but
that didn't seem to last (although I was recompiling at will back then).

Anybody know where to look?  I noticed for the first time that it mentions 
"Using Linux RTC hardware (1024Hz)" which may have always been there, but 
I never noticed it before.

Duane