Found source of system crash/blue screen when changing SB Audigy2 EAX speaker environment settings that I posted earlier this week.

I've posted the following in the Audio forum, too:

Thanks to a truly patient (and knowledgeable) Dell tech support rep - the 3rd (and last) one I talked to during 4 hours on the phone today - the cause of my system crashes/blue screen when I tried to enable or access any option within the SB Audigy2 EAX console speaker environment settings was rooted in a PC Mag-recommended registry cleaner program called Registry First Aid. Dell sent me a new SB driver CD and when this didn't resolve my problem I would have bet a year's salary I had a faulty SB card. Fortunately I didn't make the bet.

The Registry First Aid application has an option to enable or disable a program that loads during system start up to look for updates. For whatever reasons, the RFA update program was causing an apparent memory or other software conflict with the SB Audigy2 EAX console speaker environment option such that any attempted speaker setting changes would cause an immediate system crash and blue screen. As I noted in my original post here, once set, I only rarely had a reason to change the speaker settings, so I wasn't aware the conflict/system crash problem existed until I tried to make changes recently. It would never have occurred to me the Registry Clearner application was the culprit, which I installed this past Feb. 12th. The problem was found by deselecting all startup programs via msconfig, then adding each program listed in startup one at a time, rebooting, and checking the SB speaker options functionality.

If you have the RFA program installed and you're experiencing similar problems, this is where to look first!

Message Edited by VCraig on 04-03-2004 11:13 PM