ECS K7VTA3 (VT8235/VT1612A) Sound Adventures

[WilliamShipley]

I have upgraded my old ECS K7VTA3 (ver 6.0) motherboard to Vista Office. Onboard audio is supported by VT8235 Southbridge with the VT1612A codec.

The driver loaded when I installed vista is the VIA AC'97 Enhanced Audio Controller. (Provider Microsoft 6/21/2006 6.0.6000.16386 signer Microsoft Windows). It seems to work just fine.

About a month ago, I had some problems with the Microsoft updater providing a realtek driver as an update which would then fail to load (error 10). Eventually I figured this out, reverted the driver then told the updater that I wanted it to stop reupdating it. So far so good.

However, I'm having trouble with Windows Media Player which is reporting error C00D11B1. The microsoft site called up by the code suggests that "Your sound device, such as a sound card or sound controller, requires an updated driver." Searching on the web gives the impression that this is due to new digital rights code that can be used to keep someone from porting the output of protected media out of their sound card to make an unprotected copy. This is just a guess, but I'm looking for an updated sound driver.

I found the Vinyl 7.00b Driver which seemed to be applicable and loaded it. It comes up ok but doesn't fix the Windows Media Player problem. More interestingly, when the driver is loaded any attempt to call up the Windows Control Panel will reboot the computer. I can revert the driver and then access the control panel, reinstall it and reinstall the problem.

One possibility would be to disable the onboard support and put in a sound card with a known vista driver, but the kiss principle would dictate that increasing the parts count is not the optimal solution.

Any ideas?

[T@2]

Make a clean install and disable the auto updates to not mess up again your computer.Make updates choosing the ones are realy needed and disable it from services panel.In Vista this updates destroyed my video driver stability so i stopped them totally and from then the "nvklmm .. stopped responding" error is just a memory .
In Vistai had a driver update for my network card that made me roll back to the XP driver i was already using because the connection was useless.
For PCI soundcard i recommend Audigy 2 Value, if u find it somewhere, even as used one.
Or get a Via Envy 24 HT implementation.
ECS has a tradition in onboard sound problems, some day may stop working.