Have just acquired an old Packard Bell system which runs fine except that during boot up it tries to load drivers for a Soundblaster Pro. The soundcard is actually a C-Media & it works fine once Windows is up & running. During boot up I get a message saying 'Your soundcard must be a SB Pro to use the drivers' - click 'ok' & all loads fine. I can find no reference to Soundblaster in MSconfig startup, or in the startup folder. There's no add/remove program & nothing listed for SB or Creative. I've checked the 'run' sections in the registry & found nothing. I've run a couple of registry cleaners & I still get the message. So, can someone let me know which the SB drivers are that I'm looking for so I can try & find what's loading them or suggest how else I can get around this problem? "I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad"

Open up c:\config.sys and c:\autoexec.bat with 'notepad' (don't use anything else). Look for any soundblaster stuff.

There are two run sections in the Registry. One for Current User and and one for Local Machine. Did you look in both of them. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Also look in the next section RunOnce. Entries here will stay until such time as they have been successfully executed. Stuart

I've removed every mention from Autoexec but the message still appears (it's definitely a Windows driver, not a DOS one). Yes I checked all 'run' locations - I also very laboriously went through doing a search for 'sb' as a string - you wouldn't believe how many there are to check (addresSBook is everywhere!!)- but still no joy. Had a decent night's sleep now so shall tackle afresh later today. "I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad"

Problem solved (I think) - I was ignoring a couple of MIDI codecs which I didn't realise were to do with SB - it was only after deleting everything in the Multimedia section before reinstalling the C-Media that I noticed there were fewer MIDI listings. "I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad"