Figured I'd start a clearing house thread for this issue since it seems to be a very common problem on newer gaming setups. Someone mentioned to me last night that the newer PCIe video cards (particularly SLI or Crossfire-capable cards that have not been marked as Windows Compliant) have some built-in audio capability that causes bus conflicts with a separate HD Audio chipset. This causes several different problems:

- The video card works but the sound doesn't. The HD audio device will show a "Code 10: Device Cannot Start" error in Device Manager.
- The sound works, but the video card will only work on a limited basis (i.e. VGA from like 1990). In this situation, DirectX and Direct3D also do not load, which will prevent any modern games from loading at all.
- Both will work, however after a half hour or so of playing a graphics-heavy game the sound will overheat the GPU and cause the sound to cut off and/or you will lock up or you will get a blue screen.

A hotfix (KB888111) was released by Microsoft to remedy the problem on both XP 32/64 and Vista, but it doesn't seem to work when installed from Windows Update. A secondary update has been mentioned but not yet released.

Here's an idea what I did that finally got things working again. Please note that at the moment, I have not done any testing to see if this solution is stable or permanent (i.e. through a cold boot or a restart) but at least everything is working.

1) Uninstall any drivers related to HD Audio from the Add/Remove Programs CP. You can keep the sound and video codecs in place, they are not affected. If you're using a NVIDIA video card, remove the nForce apps/control panels and Nvidia drivers as well. When you click on "NVIDIA Drivers" in the add/remove program list, you can choose a custom uninstall that will bring up a window like this:

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b1...wpster/001.jpg

Choose to uninstall everything except the display driver (your window may show a checkbox for an audio driver, mine didn't).

2) Download this driver & registry cleaning tool. and the most recent drivers for your particular audio and video setup. Once the utility is installed, reboot to Safe Mode.

3) In safe mode open up the driver sweeper. Select anything related to sound and any ATI or NVIDIA drivers not directly related to video, then click the remove button (i.e. the broom). Reboot and repeat this step a couple more times, always in safe mode.

4) Open your BIOS. Look under the integrated peripherals section for the HD Audio toggle. By default it will be set to "Auto". Change this to "On", or "Disabled" if there is no On setting. Save and reboot normally to Windows.

5) When Windows starts up you'll probably see several notices about hardware Windows deteced - let them install using the default PnP drivers. If you have an "unknown PCI Device" that can't be installed automatically, do the following:

- Download this file http://downloadmirror.intel.com/11036/eng/kb888111.exe
- Use 7-zip or WinRAR to extract, then extract KB888111XPSP2.exe to a new folder i.e. Desktop\kb888111patch
- Point the driver path to Desktop\kb888111patch\commonfiles and it will install the driver and the unknown device will become "Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio".

6) Open the Device Manager and go to Display Adapters - it should show your video card (if it doesn't, reinstall your video drivers but DO NOT install any control panel extensions). Then check Sound, Video & Game Controllers. There should be five entries, for codecs and legacy drivers (If you see anything with a yellow (!) on it here, uninstall the device and reboot).

7) Install the latest version of your HD audio drivers and reboot to Windows. The sound should now work correctly, and you should see the volume control appear in the taskbar near the clock. If it does not, or your BIOS did not have an "On" setting, reboot to BIOS and change the onboard audio to Auto, then reboot again and it should work.

I'll post the results of further stability testing on this fix when I have it. In the meantime, discuss.