Microsoft really screwed over Creative, Turtle Beach, and M-AUDIO (the
three largest sound card manufacturers before Windows Vista's release)
by making it impossible to make the sound card talk with Windows on a
low level with the new and "improved" WSS, something they all did for
both performance, features, and to get around some nasty bugs with the
Windows Sound System. For the "SoundBlaster Live!", only a few versions
actually work and even then they usually have some bad clicking noises.
A lot of the older Creative Cards (as well as every Turtle Beach and
M-AUDIO cards, which are still unsupported in Win7) required some of the
extensions they could exploit which they no longer can. Creative has
done a pretty decent job in working around a lot of the issues, but none
of the older cards work "right". To my knowledge, the only Live! (not
counting the Audigy Live!) that works is the 24-bit internal, but I
think the 24-bit external might work too.

Do you need 5.1 surround? I dual-boot a Creative X-Fi Titanium and it
actually works pretty well. I don't get 5.1 surround in Linux, but all
I'm ever doing in Linux is listening to music, so it doesn't effect me
much. Other X-Fi cards have even more success than I've had with the
Titanium, and I think you can even get 5.1 surround with PCI X-Fi's
these days.

-Adam

On 1/25/2010 6:09 PM, Justin Kremer wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 5:30 PM, bnr bnr <zzabnr at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I bet that the driver is not signed. If you have unsigned drivers
>> blocked they cannot be installed. It may be worth looking into before
>> you give up on the card.
>>     
> I did think of that, and unfortunately, that is not the case.  A
> couple of the versions of drivers I tried were signed, so that is not
> the problem.  At this point I'm not really interested in
> troubleshooting that particular card in Windows because I've seen
> similar issues with older Creative products on newer versions of
> Windows before, and I have little hope of resolving the issue.  And it
> seems wrong to ask a LUG for help getting something to work in
> Windows!
> Thanks for the idea, though.
> On the upside, this issue has caused me to re-assess what I actually
> NEED to use Windows for, and with a little bit of work, I may be able
> to use Windows so rarely that I won't even care if sound works.  We'll
> see how that works out.
> - Justin
>
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>