Dead Air at Beginning of Track

Every time I record a track, i get around 4-6 seconds of dead air at the beginning of the track. I'm using RM 3.35 and Windows XP. I'm playing the songs with Windows Media Player 9. Sometimes there is also a little blip of audio at the beginning of the track that is separated from the rest of the song by a little less than a second of dead air. If I delete the dead air in between the blip and the rest of the song, it links together and sounds good. Anybody know what's going on or have similar problems?

FYI, I reverted back to Replay Music 2.5 and it works great again. Still don't know why I had problems using version 3.35 with Windows XP.