Originally posted by Pyronion
So also no music program or a internet browser??
An idling browser just takes up RAM, when you have 512MB or more of it you should be fine.
A running multimedia player also takes up CPU time, so it will slow you down - but just a tiny bit. I usually have foobar2000 running when playing PS and it works fine

Just make sure you disable any cpu-intensive plugins like spectral visualization stuff etc.