Question Audio loss with Creative X-Fi after late Feb/early March 2019 update?

[Morisatos]

Not sure how to describe this but it 'seems' to be related to the March 2019 Windows Update.

-Audio cuts off in games after playing a variable timeframe of 8-30 minutes. This affects the whole OS.

-Temp. fix would be to close all browsers and anything else using audio then go into Device Manager to disable/re-enable the Creative Audio driver (sometimes will require restart or hang device manager if messed around which then requires a hard reset).

-Watching shows or browsing the net is fine as long as I don't play any games.

-Unity engine type games seem to be fine.

-Already tried uninstalling drivers, DDU, then re-installing drivers to no avail. Also tried unplugging the PCI-E card, cleaning it a bit before re-inserting it back in.


Anyone else own a X-Fi card and have this issue or have a solution? Only started happening recently this month.

 

[Dave8671]

I lookup the march update its only a security updates. This could be a ram psu issue. What is the specs of your system, do you over clock the system or is this a brand computer? Looking up this card seems this issue happens a lot. I suggest testing the ram and power supply.

 

[Morisatos]

I lookup the march update its only a security updates. This could be a ram psu issue. What is the specs of your system, do you over clock the system or is this a brand computer? Looking up this card seems this issue happens a lot. I suggest testing the ram and power supply.

Decided to uninstall all Feb/March updates and reinstall them one by one. Before I did the reinstall, I lowered the overclock of my ram from your mention of either PSU/Ram issue. Seems to have worked (did some X-Fi driver tweaking as well by uninstalling the x64 edition and turning off EAX for testing before deciding to leave it that way). My games aren't cutting off audio now. I then slowly reinstalled all Feb updates then did some game testing to find no issues. Finally I installed the March Monthly Rollup and it was also fine. The one thing I kept from the install was KB4474419 (SHA-2 implementation) as it seems to prolong boot into W7 for some reason. Other than that, everything seems to be normal again. Thanks for some advice.

 

[Dave8671]

You did not state that you OC the ram in the first thread post. It would have been information to start with. Now I am wondering if all the others with ram issues on msi are OC ram?