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Creative drivers break my system in many different ways
I've recently reinstalled Windows 7. Completely wiped my system partition and installed W7 there from scratch. I am now having huge problems with audio.
First thing I would like to mention is that I had none of these problems on my previous installation. Audio worked perfectly.
Well, first thing I notice is audio doesn't work. Drivers are, of course, not present. So I install my trusty Daniel_k drivers for my Audigy SE using the setup.exe. First thing I notice - static. Not hardware related, because when the drivers weren't there I got complete silence. Next thing I notice is that as soon as I restart my computer, it locks up. Explorer.exe is dead (can't drag selection boxes on desktop, taskbar is not responding). The mouse then stops moving and I hear a continuous loop of the last half-second of audio that was played. Have to hard-reboot the PC.
I've isolated this issue to the Creative drivers. I uninstalled all the Creative programs (audio control panel, all that junk). System was a bit more stable, could drag selection boxes etc. now. But the static was still there. Went to the playback options and got to a button that said something like "only digital output". Checked it - static was gone. "Great", I thought. Played some music in foobar2000 - nothing. unchecked the box - music blasts loudly for one second and the whole PC freezes again with the infinite loop.
I've reformatted and reinstalled W7 twice to no avail. Problem is still present. This is all after installing all the W7 updates (SP1 is integrated into the OS), but I doubt this makes any difference.
The drivers from Windows Update have the same problem, as do the official Creative drivers from their site.
At the moment I am connected to my onboard audio, no issues. This is not a solution for me, though, as I want to use my sound card. Anyone know something that might help? The most surprising thing is that after multiple reformats it didn't work at any time.
Last edited by photonman62; 05 Aug 2011 at 18:36.