I use a Creative Labs X-Fi sound card with my Vista PC, and now I also use it with Windows 7 Beta. What's the real story with kernel-mode sound card drivers in Vista and Windows 7 ? I asked Creative about this, and they said that the Vista WDM makes it necessary for them to provide only kernel-mode drivers for X-Fi sound cards, and no user-mode drivers. On the other hand, I also have an ATI graphics card which only requires a user-mode driver in Vista. What gives? Thanks.

I'm not sure about a user-mode driver for this device. What I do know is that my X-Fi was causing a number of stablity issues on x86 and x64. Once I pulled it from my system everything began running as it should.

If i remember correctly It's because running through all the crash logs (yes they do look at them) they found the single largest cause of crashes was the sound card driver doing things that it should NEVER have been allowed to do. Hence the change in Vista which killed alot of 3d sound functionality because in essence they were hacks. I cannot blame them for wanting to move the sound drivers to a mode that limits what they can affect on the system, MS gets blamed for instability when it is largly the perferial devices and thier drivers / bloatware (i'm lookign really hard at you creative!) that cause it. When the saw a way to remady this they did so, and I hope they keep it up!As to why video drivers were not altered in the same way, they were altered in different ways for a different reason. Because they did not hack fuctionality together that comprimised the underlying OS like the sound card MFG's did.-Phil