Hello,

I have had this problem on and off. I had blue screens when I first put
Vista on the machine, then they subsided after all the updates were
installed. That was over 7 months ago. In the past few weeks, I have started
having trouble again, and everything seems to be pointing to an issue between
Vista and my X-Fi Music Sound card.

Basically, the problem is upon returning from sleep after being asleep for
over about an hour, the computer acts very flaky up until it completely locks
up about 30 seconds after resuming. After doing a hard reboot, there is no
sound upon returning to Windows. After a second reboot, sound returns. After
returning from a short sleep, or sometimes just randomly, the sound will
crackle.

I have run driver cleaners and uninstalled all creative drivers, and
reinstalled the latest driver from their website, but the problem remains. I
had one driver blue screen recently, but it was only the second boot after
reinstalling sound drivers, otherwise the problem is still exactly as stated
above.

I have the driver set on Disable all Enhancements as reccomended elsewhere,
still no help, except instances of crackling reduced.

Last night, I switched the computer to hibernate instead of sleep, and have
yet to check it today. But I would prefer to have full use of the sleep
feature.

Computer's specs:
Asus a8n5x motherboard (939)
AMD X2 2.45Ghz
1x4GB DDR400 RAM
2 SATA hard drives
2 IDE optical drives
350 watt antec
8800GT 512MB video card
X-Fi music sound card
Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Before I put Vista on it, the computer was rock stable running XP
Professional, all hardware was the same except 2GB of RAM vs 4, which was
recently added about 4 months ago.

If I use the motherboard's integrated sound, all problems seem to go away,
but the sound quality doesn't even come close, even with it having an
equalizer and the equalizer being disabled on the X-Fi.

If anyone has any ideas, please help! I know I'm not the only one with an
X-Fi with trouble, but after googling time and time again, I have yet to find
something that works.

Thanks.

This reply is late so you may already have realized the cause and solution
to your problems.
You are describing known issues with the Creative card and Vista 64.
If you do not have the latest drivers for the card download and install them
as many users feel Creative, which in my experience does not craft rock
stable drivers, has solved some of the issues.
Alas you can do nothing about the instability inherent in the Vista
hibernation/sleep modes. Hence you would be better off shutting down and
rebooting your computer then using sleep/hibernation modes.
The other issue is that in my humble experience Vista chip set drivers for
older AMD chipsets, specifically those using the now ancient 939 socket, are
terrible, awful and totally unreliable. They are not going to be upgraded
because the motherboard and chipset are obsolete.
Good news: modern and faster mobo/cpu combos are incredibly cheap.
Bad News: you will have to beg the Indian-who-took-an-American-job Microsoft
(thank you Bill Gates for that splendid bit of philanthropy) telephone
responder for a new activation code for your perfectly valid copy of Vista
if you change motherboards.