I'd agree that a lot of people are seeing X-Fi problems out there, certainly more cases than there should be. But lets be realistic, not all of the fault is in Creative's corner. I've personally had X-Fi problems as well but they were eventually resolved and they didn't always manifest themselves in different configurations/OS with even 95% of the hardware being the same.
We can look at this from 3 different perspectives: 1) Creative 2) Chipset/Mobo makers 3) Microsoft. Most people are going to jump the gun and just blame Creative for every single problem that pops up but its not completely their fault and its certainly not a product-wide problem since the card can run flawlessly on slightly different rigs. To give some examples I've seen personally or read about:
- 1) Creative- people want to blame their drivers as being buggy, and they could certainly be faster about updating them. But their drivers do work for a lot of people, until something changes on the OS or mobo/chipset or even how much RAM you're using breaks the X-Fi. Personally I think a lot of this has to do with some of the issues addressed in that NGO article, like PCI/IRQ steering, ACPI/MMIO memory addressing etc. I think the 64MB of X-RAM is also a potential conflict since the OS/chipset/BIOS and even Creative's drivers (much less game devs!) know wtf to do with it.
2) Chipset/Mobo- realistically, you can't expect Creative to guarantee 100% compatibility with every board out there given the rate new chipsets are released and how many hundreds of variations are made between the dozens of board-makers out there. Also throw into the mix that every single one of those boards from those makers vary slightly...what are the differences? Hardware features and specifications that would have a direct impact on hardware/resource sharing and compatibility. Now, if boardmakers aren't going to make the effort to Q&A test all their boards with X-Fi (still has to be the #1 most popular add-in sound solution), the impetus should not fall solely on Creative.
Unlike an OS or graphics card situation, the motherboard is reliant on those in order to run, but they're not reliant on a soundcard. Which brings us to another issue of conflict of interest. Most motherboards now offer their own sound solutions and on mid to higher-end parts it becomes a selling point as boardmakers use slightly better sound solutions to help differentiate their parts. End result is they don't really care if the X-Fi is compatible with their board because chances are the end-user won't blame them if it isn't and X-Fi not being a good option helps sell their boards.
Lastly, I know for 100% fact that not all of the problems are isolated to X-Fi hardware/drivers because I've run the X-Fi on the same board with everything the same except for adding 4GB of RAM. System performance was flaky and slow so I upgraded the BIOS which improved RAM performance, but simultaneously killed the X-Fi. A few months later, Creative released an updated driver that fixed it (specifically addressed 4GB + Vista problems). By the same token, I've seen some boards release BIOS fixes specifically for X-Fi problems.
3) MS/Vista- Its pretty well-known that there's no love lost between Creative and MS. Creative kind of thought too much of themselves and MS sought to put em in place. I think its pretty safe to say MS is getting the last laugh. Between dropping DirectSound support in Vista and not ensuring there aren't memory conflicts with Creative cards mapped memory addresses, they've made it much more difficult than it has to be for Creative and their product owners.
Again, this all ties into MMIO/ACPI memory addressing, as I'm 99% sure Creative drivers can be fixed or broken on the OS level as well. You don't see the kind of memory conflicts with ATI or NV cards, why? Because you can run Vista without a sound card, but you can't do shit without a video card. As a result MS is going to bend over backwards for wherever NV and ATI want to map their video drivers but when it comes to sound drivers you may run into conflicts all over (recent example was MS breaking a Creative Vista driver with a hot fix in Sept/Oct).
So again, I can completely understand your frustrations, especially since you're one of the many who have heard the difference with a Creative card (when they work!) and probably thinks its worth the hassle. But yes its getting old and yes it gives me second thoughts about upgrading or changing parts or purchasing a Creative card again in the future.
FYI I recently sorted out all my X-Fi problems after installing the Creative 11-05 Vista 64 drivers. I'm not fully aware of the problems you're seeing, I'd just recommend pulling the X-Fi until you see a BIOS revision, driver update, or a MS hot fix that might potentially solve your problem. As for alternatives, there's also the new-ish Auzentech Prelude built with an X-Fi chip. They could possibly have better driver support and compatibility so it might be worth a shot.
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