DracoNihil wrote:

Seeing how I struggle with getting drivers of any kind to work on this system.

of any kind? perhaps you have some other underlying symptoms/problems as well?

I think the idea of having a audio bridge for routing audio signal from hardware A input to B output by software is good - but
Windows 7 lacks the possibility to configure it in sufficient detail.
So the implementation looks more like an unfinished idea.

- More or less only one output, there is no possibility to route hardware A to C and hardware B to D and attach the sound output of applications accordingly.
- The Windows Mixer is awkward to use, a lot of clicks required to get anything setup and it is not self explanatory. If you plug hardware like a HDMI TV it changes also the audio routing profiles accordingly, but they are saved internally and you can not directly edit them.
- No quality settings for sample conversion or any other data conversion algorithm setting. I don't think the exact implementation used is documented anywhere?!/
- Midi Dialog was removed entirely, you have to use a Third Party application to set this stuff now (or edit registry manually)
- No possibility to enable exclusive use of sound hardware, enabling full hardware acceleration again
- Some PlugIn functionality would also have helped.
- I would like to have a dialog where I can forbid certain applications to change any mixer settings.

There are probably some more issues, but by default you can only use it for simplest tasks. As soon as you start with some consumer level production stuff, like recording audio/video it the problems start. AFAIK with Windows 8 nothing has changed.