If anyone has a suggestion for fixing it, that'd be AWESOME.

I have a yamaha receiver hooked to my computer via optical cable. If I have nothing playing on the computer and turn the receiver off for a bit, then turn it on there is no humming. As soon as I hit play on winamp a humming starts. If I leave it off for a while, the humming stops. It never used to do this before. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I just restarted my computer and it is still doing it. I don't really have any idea what else I could do. Since it is optical it can't/shouldn't be any sort of electrical interference on the computer side.

try cleaning the optical ends there may be dirt or somethign interfearing the "light" reception

Although I would have thought that this would pretty much sever the connection, but if cleaning the connectors doesn't work, perhaps the fiber-optic cable got crimped somewhere, which would cause a lot of interference (sorry for being so basic, but I have no idea how savvy you are-no offense).
-mm

I don't think that the cable got crimped anywhere. It just started in the last day and the cable runs behind my desk where nothing can really get to it. I'll give cleaning it a try (I suppose I should find my softest shirt and use that?)

On another note, is VPN down? I cannot get connected now which is angering me since I need to use vpn to log in to utopia.

If the two are close together, your computer power supply could be causing some distortion in the receiver. Just maybe.