Hello

I'm having bad problems with my sound driver.
It seems to become unstable and crash with some particular games. I get a BSoD as soon as I start Cave Story, and I get random crashes with Prince of Persia 1 and 2, as well as other games. All the minidumps point to cmuda.sys, the hardware driver for my integrated audio chip.

The errors I get are various - from the STOP codes I can remember, they are mostly IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and BAD_POOL_HEADER (would that mean that the driver is corrupting memory?). I don't think this is a hardware malfunction (unless the IC is failing due to invalid driver commands?) since it only happens with certain games (which don't seem to use any particular feature of the sound card, so it's probably the way they communicate with the sound driver interface).

This seems to be a quite common problem. I've found some threads (1, 2, 3) but they don't solve my problem.

The problem is, I can't find a working driver version (or replacement). Half a year ago I have tried 3 or 4 different drivers, downloaded from the manufacturer's webpages (tried the motherboard's website, then CMedia's website), but none solved the problem - so I just had to live with it. But now I'm back at trying to resolve this issue for good.

I will post a minidump (or a kd log) if you might be able to gather more information from it, or whatever information you might request.

Thanks in advance.

Update: I have browsed the Windows Catalog, and downloaded the last version of the driver I could find. I went ahead to reinstall the device. After the scan for the driver files, it found three sources: C:\Windows\INF, the folder where I downloaded the Windows Catalog archive, and Windows Update. All three were 5.12.1.50 (so I already had the latest version Microsoft has to offer) :/

If anyone can find a newer, working version of the driver I'd be eternally grateful.

You could try here.

Another update: I decided to re-check the manufacturers' web sites for driver info. I have an ASRock K7VM4 motherboard with a VIA KM400 chipset. CMedia's web site offers the 5.12.1.39 version of the driver (from 2003), while AsRock has 5.12.1.38. :/

Interestingly enough, DriverDetective reports that it found a better/newer driver. Of course, I don't have the means to purchase a subscription for their service in order to actually download the driver, and I don't even know for sure if their driver will help.

Thanks.