SRS Audio Essentials takes over my Realtek sound...

I've been using the very awesome program SRS Audio for a long time on my XP machine in conjunction with the 10 band EQ in the onboard Realtek card to get some pretty awesome sound. I'm making the jump to 7 soon, and I convinced my roomate to let me try seeing if it would work on his newer machine which runs 7. He has an Asus mobo, so he has Realtek as well, although a version of it that makes mine look pretty ancient. Anyways, so I got the program loaded onto his comp, plugged in my Sennheiser 280 HD Pro's and tweaked the sliders in SRS Audio for a while til I had it close to satisfactory. I came across an unfortunate limitation... as I said, back on my XP machine I could run both SRS and the Realtek EQ to fine-tune the sound. On his machine this doesn't seem to be possible, as the SRS program takes over the soundcard and moving the sliders and fiddling with the ''Environments'' (I usually use Padded Room) does nothing to the sound. I set the ''Speakers / Realtek HD Audio Output'' to default in the GUI, and nearly deafened myself, lol... the sound through it is muddy but within that setting the EQ and stuff actually work and affect the sound... I want to know if there's any way to get -both- SRS and the EQ in Realtek to affect the audio. Of course, I could just use the EQ in Winamp to adjust the bass and treble to my liking, but that only affects what comes out of Winamp, and I have been very unsuccessful in trying to find a ''Standalone'' EQ software that actually works. Can someone here help me???

Not all XP audio applications work or work satisfactorily in Vista/Windows 7. Vista/Windows 7 handles some of the audio functions differently. If you want SRS, and have the Vista/Win 7 compatible version, you will have to live with how it works in Vista/Win 7.

^ That sucks then.... anyone know where to get a reliable standalone Equalizer program? (not like a VST or or whatever, but something I can run alongside SRS Essentials so I can tweak bass and treble).