X-Fi Fatal1ty PCI/-Express - All Hardware Acceleration Crashing, Significant R

Question

Hello,
I've made a few posts on the forums recently about various topics to help me isolate the issue I am having. At this point, using the latest stable drivers for either a PCI or PCI-E X-Fi Fatalty, any hardware acceleration of sounds is causing my system to bluescreen, freeze or crash the application. Some games give me no option of not using hardware acceleration (ie. Rainbow6 Vegas 2), resorting in my having to change my Sound Acceleration down to Emulation Only. This setting greatly eases off on the sound latency buffers, resulting in sounds that are delayed an entire second. The good news is no crashes and sounds actually sound correct.
A few things to note about my setup,
) I am an extreme computer professional, programmer and developer. My Windows XP SP2 installation is incredibly streamlined; I only have 6 services running and all non-essential drivers removed, resulting in only 69MiB commit charge at startup across processes and ~950 threads. Suffice to say, my system is baby-cheek clean, and I aim to keep it that way.
2) I have been using this setup for many years now. I have been using NVIDIA video cards for the past 5+ years, currently I have a GTX280, and all of them have behaved perfectly with my streamlined setup. I even unregister every single one of NVIDIA's DLLs and stop all of their services, and the 3D Settings Per Application and Color Control Features still all work. Suffice to say, NVIDIA's drivers, although a trite on the large side, are written well enough to keep drivers away from OS services (as it should be).
3) My other hardware is not at fault. I have tested the X-Fis against multiple PSUs, different video cards, multiple fresh installations of Windows and more. I don't use utilities to clean my drivers; I do it by hand. I know exactly what's on my system and what I want removed. Though it may be egotistical to state, I'm pretty much knowledgable of every component my system has running.
4) As a result of this knowledge and my desire to keep my system clean, I ONLY HAVE INSTALLED the drivers necessary for my X-Fis to work. I DID install Creative Audio Console, but the application seems to have too many dependencies on OS Services, since it never runs, either reporting that my audio device cannot be found, or the application simply does nothing and a bogus error is written to the event log. I have enabled DCOM to make sure it wasn't dependent on that, and it still does not work. To summarize, yes, I have tried enabling every service I could find that it might depend on, and none worked. Creative Audio Console is, to me, a piece of ill-written software. In comparison to NVIDIA's excellent control panel which works no matter how much stuff I remove, Creative's Audio Console fails.
I do not have the Creative Audio Licensing Engine, I do not have the Creative Audio Control Panel, I do not have the Creative Labs Audio Engine Service, I do not have CMSS or any other OS-level services that normally get installed. Remember people, drivers are NOT TO BE DEPENDENT on OS services; they are protocols defining to the OS how to communicate with the hardware. Any necessity of additional "service" software is way past the acceptable standards of drivers.
5) That being said, I had no issues with stability using older drivers on my PCI X-Fi Fatalty cards. These drivers were dated early 2007, and did not install all of the X-Fi Effects, Utility Effects, 20x Effects, etc. drivers. Mind you I preferred these drivers since they were much simpler to track, as they only had a few .sys files.
As it stands, I want to use my PCI-Express X-Fi Fatalty, but I want to use it without all of Creative's bloat. I want streamlined, driver-only installation that does not NEED external applications to reinforce its stability. Creative, IS THAT POSSIBLE? Can someone, by definition of the Windows Driver Management signature system, just use your drivers alone for stable gaming? If not, you're violating standards and should never have received WDM cert. on any drivers. I highly recommend you do NOT spit back, saying that for proper functionality, performance, stability, etc. you must install all of Creative's supplemental software. These requires are in violation of the ethics behind software drivers and receiving Digital Signature Certification from Microsoft on your drivers.

Answer 1

Infinity7,
I do not want to sound arrogant, but the list of options you provided me with is the stereotypical laundry list of system configuration information for any piece of hardware. I'll address everything though.
) No, I'm not using an NVIDIA chipset. I'm using an ASuS Maximus Extreme, just like you said, which uses the X38 chipset.
2) I'm using Windows XP 32-bit, SP2. I have 2 GiB of memory and do NOT have PAE enabled.
2) I don't have onboard sound; our motherboard has a PCI-E sound card which I do not have installed.
3) I don't have any spyware. I don't browse the web on my system. I know every program running and have no rootkits. Nothing is hiding from me.
4) I don't use antivirus programs. I've been on the internet for 5+ years now and have never needed an antivirus program, since I know when I have a virus and I remove it manually.
5) I have the latest version of DirectX, June 2008 Redistritutable. Note that most of the post DX 9.0c revisions are meant for D3D, and have nothing to do with DSound.
6) I've tried every PCI-E slot I have, including both PCI-E x slots and both PCI-E x6 slots. The card is currently in one of my x6 slots.
7) Any 998+ system is going to have IRQ sharing. Between ACPI BIOSes (more IRQs), Windows XP and drivers, IRQs are rarely in conflict, aside from occasional USB device IRQ sharing. To answer your question, yes, currently both my video card and sound card are sharing IRQ 6. I have done enough work to isolate that IRQ sharing is NOT the issue, though, especially through my testing of the PCI card and the PCI-E card experiencing the same issue.
8) The output sampling rate of games is not always configurable, and never makes a difference. The X-Fi always upsamples everything it gets as it is, though I guess there is some validity to the sampling rates that are streamed into the buffers.
Now, to address the rest of your suggestions I say read my post. I specify that changing acceleration to emulation results in perfect stability and sounds that sound correct, however the relaxed latency results in sounds? that are easily delayed by second. This is unacceptable for gaming, obviously.
As for your ordering of driver installation, it really is through lack of knowledge that people state what order drivers must be installed in. Even NVIDIA's drivers probe for any change through the interfaces they use when the system starts, so any chipset drivers that drastically change the devices in Windows will be detected as changed by other drivers. Be that as it may, I didn't even have the X-Fi in my computer when I installed this latest version of Windows. Only after I had installed everything did I begin to install the Creative Drivers (whilst avoiding all bloatware).
Most importantly, note that I determined when the crashing started occuring with my original PCI version of the card. After I installed the drivers that started including the additional .sys files (X-Fi Effects, 20X effects, etc.) the crashing occured. As far as I know I cannot use older drivers with the PCI-E model, so rolling back to those previous drivers is out of the question.
Lastly, for my system specs,
Motherboard : ASuS Maximus Extreme X38 Chipset, BIOS 0907
CPU : Intel QX9650 (OCed from 3.0GHZ to 3.6GHZ, stable through Orthos testing)
Memory : (2) GiB Corsair Dominator Sticks, 4-4-4-2
Video : eVGA GeForce GTX280 FTW Edition (PCI-Express)
PSU : Thermaltake Toughpower 200W (backed by UPS)
Sound : Creative X-Fi Fatalty PCI / PCI-Express (tried both independently)