Scratchy sound XP Home & Creative

[msw_01_uk]

Recently I have upgraded my husband's system with an 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 the sound from the soundcard is very distorted...screeching and scratchy...when playing music (mp3's, waves and when using SoundForge etc...) and we have tried everything we can think of to fix it. Being a sound engineer it's imperative to him that the sound isn't distorted in any way.

We've changed PCI slots, installed upgraded drivers (from the Creative site), changed IRQ settings 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. We've tried using just Windows XP drivers, also KX Project drivers (from a third party site) and have made sure the speakers and cables are not damaged!

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 everything back onto his very ancient (and very slow!) Jetway motherboard! :confused:

[msw_01_uk]

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 tried all the other PCI slots, which also made no difference and there's nothing wrong with the speakers or cables.

We've now swapped sound cards. I have the Platinum card in my system and it's working perfectly (so it's not the card that's the problem). 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 when I was using the motherboard, with no sound problems, so not a motherboard conflict) and we're getting the scratchy, screeching problem again. The only thing we can think of now is a software conflict somewhere...any ideas? :confused: