Try DanielK's X-Fi driver pack. I use his drivers for my X-Fi and Audigy2 ZS cards under WinXP and Win7 and I've never had any issues.

If that doesn't help, it could be that some remnants of your old drivers are causing the problem, so it might be a good idea to do a clean WinXP install.

Thanks for the tip. Yeah I figured a clean install would be the nuclear option. I'll give that a go.

Do you know of any specific improvements in Daniel_K drivers over official? I went to his website and read the material... from what I can tell it's mostly a repackaging of Creative assets where it detects your specific sound card SKU and installs the appropriate software. Is there anything lower level that's been changed?

bZbZbZ wrote on 2020-05-25, 23:56:

Do you know of any specific improvements in Daniel_K drivers over official? I went to his website and read the material... from what I can tell it's mostly a repackaging of Creative assets where it detects your specific sound card SKU and installs the appropriate software. Is there anything lower level that's been changed?

I don't know that they change anything, besides making it easier to install the proper drivers for the supported sound cards.

Other than that, I think Daniel's driver pack also strips out the bloatware that comes bundled with Creative's drivers (usually AOL crap).

Okay, I did a clean install of Windows XP, and the Daniel_K driver caused the exact same BSOD.

I'm guessing there's a conflict with something that's been slipstreamed into my XP SP3 installation media. 🙁

I once had a defective X-FI (retail SB0460 in my case) that caused a BSOD every time I tried to install the driver in Windows 7 or 10 . I replaced with another identical retail card and it installed and worked fine (this was before the Windows 10 build 1903 driver X-FI issue, so not related to that).

Not saying that your issue is the same, just that it is a possible scenario .

If possible, I would try the card in another PC .

I would guess a faulty card as well.

The official drivers for the PCI and PCIe cards are different driver packs if I remember correctly.

The card should just work with the drivers from Creative's site. I have a couple of those cards and never had any issues with them.

The X-FI cards and drivers are notoriously buggy. You may spend a while on Creative's site hunting down the drivers for your actual item. I've had to dig around a while before finding the right ones before for certain older cards. Creative installers will also frequently lock you out of installing drivers you need for no good reason, so that's probably a plus side for the driver pack.

Have you tried the card in a different system? I have to pci xfi fatality cards since new and I've never had any issues with them or the drivers from creatives site. Also make sure it's not some own card that needs special drivers like a Dell or hp custom card.

Hi everyone, thanks for the replies. Sorry for the late update.

I tried the card in a totally different semi-modern PC (Phenom II running Windows 10). Windows 10 picked up the card immediately, sound worked fine. If I manually install any official (Creative) or unofficial (DanielK) driver, I get the BSOD. Yes, even in Windows 10. I'm aware of the multitude of Live/Audigy boards but my understanding is that there is only one sku of X-Fi Fatal1ty.

My guess now is that Darry and Cyclone3D are right... something on the hardware isn't right. I've swapped back to the lower spec X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCIe and things are fine. Oh well...