Sound Card Issue!

[ringfinger]

About 2,3 weeks ago now I had to reformat my PC after some bad issues with a hard drive. I have been having so much trouble with my soundcard, which is a Creative SundBlaster X-Fi Platinum. Now, whenever the card is in my computer just sits at the XP loading screen forever and never makes it to the desktop or automatically reboots once it would sem the desktop should appear. I've learned through research that Creative drivers are $hit and they haven't been updated in over a year for my model. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers from the OEM CD many many times with no luck. When i pull the card, everything boots fine. The weird thing is that it works sometimes... and sometimes it doesn't. Somtimes it lets me boot, some times it doesn't ANY IDEAS??!?!? Anyone know where to get some updated drivers for this card??

Thanks MSFN

[Ponch]

Update from when ? The official site has a driver from october 2006 which is not that old.

[ringfinger]

Those are the drivers I have. They aren't working. Like I said I've uninstalled all OEM, reinstalled those and still have the same result.

During my troubleshooting I tried almost eveyrthing including resetting my BIOS to its default settings. i'm wondering if I screwed something up in there... but the PCI settings look normal.

[puntoMX]

I would think about a bad contact with the PCI sloth or a dying soundcard...

[ringfinger]

I've cleaned up the pins, the card is only 4 months old... This is driving me nuts! I know that it's always been an issue even before my reformat because it took Windows 5 minutes to shut down. Now, with the card removed, it takes 1-15 seconds like it should. Maybe there is an IRQ or some other type of hardware conflict?

[Ponch]

Try the card in an other computer to see if it causes erratic behaviour as well.

[ringfinger]

I don't have another computer to try it in. I've been reading on other forums about many issues like this with the whole X-Fi Series. Some suggestions include to remove all drivers in windows, clean remaining files with DriverCleanerPro in safe mode and then reinstalling. Also some suggest removing the IDE cable which connects to the extension bay slot. As well as moving it to another PCI slot, which I can't do b/c I have a 2 slotted ATI x1800xt which blocks access to my other PCI slot. I'm going to try a few of these things tonight, but if anyone out there has any other suggestions I'd be grateful.