The latest driver for my Gigabyte GA-7VRX rev 2.0 motherboards onboard sound causes speed issues and may also be causing restarts. The installer for the driver is unreadable "?????" you have to hit the buttons by guesswork.

One specific problem and the easiest to recreate is with Spider solitare which comes with XP, when dealing with the sound effects on the cards hesitate and go slowly.

Other issues include a dropput of the sound during video conferencing and I beleive it is contributing to Battlefield 1942 Dersert Combat mod dropping to the desktop during play.

I have had a old driver for the AC97 sound that didn't cause this problem, but I no longer have it available to me where I am and have wiped and reloaded XP so I can't rollback.

Any ideas how to get the latest driver working correctly or where I can download an older version?

Thanks.

How about the driver CD that came with your motherboard?
You mobo has a VIA integrated sound - you can try to installing the sound driver supplied by VIA from www.viaarena.com

I'm half a world away from it. My CD is at my home in Michigan, I am on a contract job in Kuwait. I'll try viaarena.

You've probably fixed it by now but...

Give the AC97 driver the flick. "search for a better driver" with the m.board cd in. Install the Nvidia R driver.

Problemn solved.

The AC97 caused gross stuttering in 3d games everytime it made a SFX and my audio CD's sounded like badly handled records, pop, scratch... No probs with Nvidia driver:grinthumb