Hi Guys n gals,

I installed an Audigy Value in my XP SP2 box today and since the start the sound quality has been crappy. The sound skips/distorts every few seconds when I play mp3s or avis.

I've tried newer drivers from soundblaster.com and creative.com but I get the good old "soundblaster not detected" crapola. I'm sooo not in the mood for this.

So anyway I extracted the driver exe and then let windows search for an appropriate driver where I extracted it. It updated the drivers which seemed to work, but this didnt solve the problem.

I researched the problem on google and found that this can happen sometimes when an onboard sound card conflicts with your SB crap I mean SB Audigy, but the onboard soundcard was disabled in the BIOS before I even plugged it in.

Question: could the fact that there are drivers on the system for the disabled sound card be causing this problem? How can I uninstall drivers? I know how to uninstall a device but how do you kill off driver files? Or wont they hurt if the device isnt installed/is disabled in the BIOS?

Anyway does anyone know how to stop my SB Audigy value sounding so bad?

I once had exactly the same problem with a SB Live! and solved that problem by finding "magic" drivers which actually accepted that the card WAS installed and stopped the snap crackle and pops, pardon the pun.

Please help.

PS. Windows and drivers are all up-to-date. Adjusting the Audio Hardware Acceleration to all the settings from Full to None didnt help.

depends on what inteegrated sound you have, which you did not mention

driver cleaner pro
http://www.drivercleaner.net/
will remove some audio drivers, or, you can remove them manually by learning what they are from the original install package and then dropping into safe mode and deleting the files (after uninstalling in device manager)

Thanks for the URL. Re-installing windows fixed the problem, confirming imho that the drivers were causing the problem. I realise it was a bit of a sledgehammer solution, but I wanted to re-install before that anyhow to fix the media buttons on my mouse.

Thanks for the help though.