High pitch whine when recording audio & voiceover in iMovie

I have read other posts on similar issues but found no resolution
Issue:
When recording video in iMovie there is sometimes a high-pitched whine which renders the video useless. 
The problem was intermittent ... annoying but I wokred around it by re-recording the video enough times to finally get a "clean" copy.
Now I am recording voice-overs for some clips and the awful whine is present in ALL the voice-overs. 
I have tried the "trick" of using brighter light.  No joy.
I have tried adjusting the microphone settings.  No joy.
THis is an older macbook ... so I can't trade-in for a new one on warrantee. 
Is Mac's internal microphone defective?  I have read enough other people have similar issues to think this.
I am doing educational videos.  My initial joy at being able to record a video on my macbook is changing to despair as I have wasted hours of time on tech problems like this. 
Anyone have a real fix? 
Is the built-in camera and mic just shoddy junk which doesn't work well?
Thank you

Did you do the usual stuff, such as reset PRAM?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
There are some sound settings in PRAM, although I think it's only for sound output.
Also, as a test, I would create a new admin user account in System Preferences Accounts pane
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8235.html
Log out and log in to the new account (do not use Fast User Switching). In the new account, try recording something using QuickTime, and note if this problem recurs. If it does not, you have eliminated a few possible causes, such as a problem with the overall system installation or a hardware issue, and isolated the problem to something in your normal user account.

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