So this is a 2-part question that really addresses the same concern.

On the one hand, are there any decent sound cards that you can still find for sale that do not require a dongle and don't stick out of the slot? I noticed there are some Panasonic cards that take it a step further and use the internal sound hardware in the laptop, which is awesome but I can't find these cards to buy. Any other card that functions like this would be appreciated. I care more about audio quality and xp support than dos/vintage stuff, contrary to my usual sentiments, because for this laptop I just want better snr, bitrate, sample rate, post-processing etc than what the onboard sound can provide.

The second consideration is whether there are any known expresscard cards (either width) that are good. I saw that Creative has the X-Fi Xtreme and X-Fi cards, both of which apparently suck because they are almost entirely software emulated cards using the PC to do everything. The one good card they have, the Audigy 2 ZS notebook, takes the older PCMCIA, which isn't necessarily a problem for me except that I have another card I want to put there and I'd like to have both simultaneously so it just wastes 1 slot and makes a nuisance of swapping the other one. Therefor any good expresscard sound card would also be appreciated.