sound drivers stop working

[tasty danish]

I'm pretty savy with google but this has me stumped.

I'm using an abit ip35 mobo with a sondigo inferno (think auzentech) soundcard, hooked to my stereo receiver via toslink, running on vista 64 ultimate.

on dvds, open al games, and anything not direct3d sound related , i get glorious 7.1 surround sound with all the fixens and my heart swells with love.

howeva... this lasts for about a day, then at some point, with NO warning, no error messages, and no abnormal behavior, i'll turn my PC on and the soundcard won't work.

depending on the media player i use, it either simply won't play a file, or it will come with some BS error like, windows is low on memory i promise you, i'm not low on memory unless foobar uses 4 gigs.

if i run any kind of soundcard configuration utility it errors with "failed to play the test tone"

a quick reinstallation of the drivers fixes the issue for a few days.

i've tried:

reinstallion,
different PCI socket,
any number of sound settings under the sun,
uninstalling devices,
different soundcard (same chipset) drivers,
registry cleaning,

the only error log message i can find is related to i8042prt driver file not loading which from what i've read is related to mouse operation.
there are no conflicts, according to windows.

any ideas? i have NON

[BipolarBill]

Vista has tons of audio driver issues. You need to load the very latest version if you want it to work properly.

Vista is a control freak and doesn't like hardware audio controllers. It insists on "filtering" the audio through software. MS really skrewed the pooch on this. Luckily, there are workarounds. The latest drivers have them.

[tasty danish]

but that's what I'm saying, not only have I tried the latest drivers, i've tried the lateset drivers from sondigo, auzentech, ht claro, and maybe a few others.

is there some special driver release i'm not aware of? the latest sondigo has on their site is still a beta, which is what originally prompted me to look at drivers from a different card with the same chipset in a final version.

this card has none of the issues my SB audigy 2 had, i bought it because of all that foolery. when it works, it's awesome. there's full surround and good bass.

[BipolarBill]

You would need to use the Auzentech drivers. They are the latest drivers. If they won't work with your card, you will have to wait for your card maker to fix their drivers.