hello all, am hoping someone out there can give me some help, to hopefully sort out a couple of strange, but rather irritating audio problems that I am having, mainly with some VI audio games. the first, is that on some games, I get no sound at all. I have run the directX diagnostic tool, and think I have found where this problem may be, as when testing the sound, it is fine, until it gets to sounds coming through a hardware buffer, then the sound won't play. the annoying thing is, that the program doesn't give any ideas of how to fix this problem. the second, is that in some other games, and in winamp also, the very beginning of a sound doesn't get played, or if it is very short, the whole sound. for example, a menu item that should say "new game" will come out like "ame" I hope I have explained that clearly. machine is running XP pro sp3, has a core(TM)2 duo CPU, with 3gb memory, and the usual standard built in realtec soundcard. Simon