I've been using the X-Fi XtremeGamer in my Core 2 Quad machine for the past several years. The board is an ASUS P5Q PRO, which has two PCI slots, the OS is Vista.

Recently I started experiencing audio glitches with the X-Fi. It started with occasional noise, or no audio at all (especially after standby/resume). Just in case, I tried reinstalling/updating the drivers, and installing the latest DanielK package. Did not help (not that it was really expected). Then I tried taking the card out, cleaning it, and moving it between the different PCI slots.

At present the situation is this:

• When the card is in the first PCI slot - it produces no audio at all. Not only that, but any audio playback fails to start (Winamp stops after 2 seconds of every track, Youtube just doesn't start playing the video, etc.)
• When the card is in the second PCI slot - it sort of works, but sometimes audio is noisy.
• There are no errors in the device manager, the card is always detected - it just glitches out.
• I switched back to using onboard audio, which so far works fine

Given the symptoms, and the fact that it behaves differently in different slot - I suspect a hardware problem. I wonder if anyone has experience with similar issues to know whether it's more likely to be the card or the motherboard (which is almost 10 years old and has recovered from clinical death once before). At the moment I have no other PCI cards to try and no other computers with PCI slots in this house. 😀