Recently I have upgraded my husband's system with my old MSI (MS6378) motherboard, an Athlon 1900+ XP CPU and 1GB of RAM. He's using his existing hard drives (with a fresh install of XP Home), CD and DVD drives, 3Com Ethernet PCI card and Creative Soundblaster Live Platinum card with LiveDrive. Since the installation he gets really bad sound from the soundcard when playing music (mp3's, waves and when using SoundForge) and we have tried everything we can think of to fix it. We've changed PCI slots, installed upgraded drivers (from the Creative site), changed IRQ settings from 5 to 9 in the BIOS and uninstalled and reinstalled the card and all the drivers, all to no avail. The onboard sound isn't causing a conflict as the drivers haven't been installed and it's been disabled in the BIOS. We've also checked for an updated version of BIOS from the MSI site and tried a PCI Latency patch. I used to have the MSI (with VIA chipset) motherboard installed on my old computer and used a SoundBlaster Live card with no problems and have run out of ideas now. Can anyone please help before we end up putting everying back onto his very ancient (and very slow!) Jetway motherboard!

Did you try the on board sound to see what it sounded like? I once had an old SB card and it sounded scratchy too. Never figured it out. YO

Define "bad sound". Could it be that you damaged the speaker/cable in the meantime?

The onboard sound is not worth using. My husband is a sound engineer so it's imperative that the sound is crystal clear and no, the speakers and/or cables are not damaged in any way.

What graphics card do u use, it is known for Creative Sound Blasters to conflict with some video adaptors.

We're using onboard graphics at the moment (8MB Shared). A 64MB Sapphire Radeon 7000 PCI card is on order but we haven't received it yet.

Right, we've tried some more things now so will update on the problem. We've disconnected the live drive, which made no difference at all. We've swapped sound cards. I now have the Platinum card in my system and it's working perfectly. The Soundblaster card that I used to have on the MSI motherboard is now back on my husband's PC (where it was originally installed) and we're getting the scratchy, screeching problem. The only thing we can think of now is a software conflict somewhere...any ideas?