Re: Snap, Crackle, Pop - VST Effect & Sound Card Problems

[mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 1:42 PM -0700 5/22/06, Art Simon wrote:
>Installing and uninstalling hardware makes changes to the windows
>registry. I've never had much luck "hacking the registry", but
>reinstalling Windows should solve the problem. Sounds drastic, but at
>work, I often find it less time consuming to reformat the hard-drive
>and reinstall the software than troubleshoot. Probably not the answer
>you were looking for. . .

When I used Windoze (up until this past year), I used to "hack the 
registry" all the time.  You'd be amazed at how crappily uninstall 
programs actually clean up after themselves.  If I had a nickel for 
every registry entry that was leftover after a clean uninstall, I'd 
be able to pay for another WIntel lappy.

Most likely, you got a pointer misplaced.  Either the win 
configuration is still pointing to the Audigy driver, and it's 
incompatible with the Echo.  Or possibly it's pointing to the Audigy 
driver and that driver's been erased, so it's defaulting to the 
crappy Windows multimedia driver.  Or they're all installed and 
something else takes up the IRQ before the Echo driver can load.  Or 
something similar.

Before you wipe the system and start again (and I'm not saying that 
that's not what you'll ultimately have to do), go to the 'Run' item 
in your 'Start' menu.  Type "regedit" to bring up the registry edit 
tool.

Use the "Find" feature to look for anything that possibly might 
contain keywords related to your Audigy card.  Try "emu", "e-mu", 
"audigy"... you're intelligent; you get the point.  Delete (or 
rename) any keys you find associated with the whacked out drivers, as 
well as any files you find as pointers.  You can also look through 
the entries for the sound drivers (there's a section of the file tree 
on the left that is associated with hardware, and a section within 
that dedicated to the soundcard) and make sure that they're pointing 
to the proper place.  You can also try searching for the Echo 
drivers, and make certain they're properly installed.

Good luck.  Last year, I had to waste a work day going through this 
duck hunt on my Win2k box, when a piece of spyware installed a new IP 
stack so it could wiretap and track all my Internet connections. 
Unfortunately, the "new" driver was incompatible with my computer and 
hosed all my networking -- turning it into an unconnected lump.

You may still have to wipe and reconfig, but maybe this will work first.

        --m.
-- 
_______
"Snakes, as the great philosophers used to say, on a motherfucking 
plane...."