irqbalance exits

I have a Core 2 Duo desktop with Debian "sid", Linux 2.6.21-rc5 (soon to be -rc6)--this behavior has been a problem for as long as I have had the machine, however. Under load it becomes very jittery and my music skips, something that, thanks to Linux's excellent scheduling implementation and preemption support, never seems to happen on my uniprocessor Pentium M laptop. I suspect this is related to interrupt handling, so I installed the irqbalance daemon, which, when I run it, does seem to do a great deal to alleviate the problem--for example, in gkrellm, I again see a "balancing" of the load between the two cores; they are both being utilized, whereas before it seemed that the first core was working much harder than the other one (which is what leads me to believe that interrupt handling is the issue). Here's the rub, though: irqbalance exits after a short while, after appearing to run successfully. Is this normal behavior--shouldn't I want it running all the time, redistributing interrupts as needed?

It goes without saying that having this very nice computer behave in this manner is rather frustrating, so any help would be greatly appreciated...