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Exactly what I was going to write mate

Yeah, the experience I had with my X-Fi during the Vista betas made me really mad at Creative. My only problem is that I am addicted to their CMSS-3D technology. What I ended up doing was buying a Creative Xmod. It's basically a USB sound card that has built-in CMSS. But since it's a USB sound card, it just uses drivers that are included with Windows. That means it's future-proof and supports Linux also.

smoking crack again? what problems

Seriously? It took how long for us to get drivers that actually worked? I actually gave up on PC gaming because I was just so fed up with the hassles.

i been running vista since november of 2006, there were issues maybe till around march. tell me what HUGE issues did you have.

Crashing whenever I exited any 3d game, a "Dundun" sounds was made.
BSOD randomly in games.
My favorite Creative driver error, randomly the drivers will just disappear off my computer it takes about 2 months, I restart my computer and poof "Windows is looking for drivers". Gotta love Creative drivers!
Right now I'm using on-board, it doesn't sound anywhere near as nice, but its stable, and I rather have a Stable setup than a expensive unstable but better sounding setup.

Oh quit the fanboy defensive attitude already, it's getting old. Not everyone has perfect experiences with Vista or any other OS for that matter.

And which other manufacturers create cards that fully support hardware EAX? All others i've ever seen were based on realtek chipsets which nowhere come close.

Or the fact that each time the machine's reset, I loose all of my sound and speaker settings and have to reconfigure it every single time. If I do another 'clean' install of the drivers, I think I'll go insane.

A few now since Creative has been losing money as of late. MSI has a on-board sound chip-set from Creative and one other company has a sound card out that's based off the X-Fi sound cards but it's been beefed up a bit.

Sorry just had to respond here..

Problems?

How about all the dropped hardware features in Vista??

What am I on about..

Ok.. This just from memory....

Popping and clicking randomly.. Fine under XP..

Loss of hardware acceleration in games under Vista - requiring a software hack workaround emulation layer that took creative months to get working..

Loss of a perfectly working and supported 6.1 speaker mode in hardware under Vista... My rear centre speaker has been silent ever since the upgrade to Vista. These are official creative speakers as well.. That really sucked..

Total loss of hardware ability to playback and decoded Hi Def Audio DVD format - again perfectly working and advertised as such under Vista - now totally removed...

Best bit of all - after months of waiting for all these and others to be fixed - they want to charge US for "buying" the new Vista drivers cd..

Xi-fi was a premium product released at the tail end of XP's lifecycle - it felt very botched once Vista was upon us..

Creative or MS's fault for removing support from the OS? Doesn't really matter - Vista was massively delayed and they both had months to work all this out.. Creative's story is things got moved at the last moment in Vista - the goalposts got up and moved... I reckon its more like 50/50...

Personally, since owning almost every single card Creative put out since 1993 - I promised myself I wouldnt' touch any of their products with a bargepole ever again - they just lost one loyal customer over all this ugly episode with Vista....

Creative - get your act together!!

Vista driver problems, Linux driver problems. How many people have worthwhile audio equipment for their PC anyway? I don't.

With decent audio being available onboard most motherboards that support 7.1 analog out and digital outs, I'm surprised that the sound card market hasn't shriveled up.