Vista - Some help deciding

Here lies my dilemma
On one hand if I use XP I get 5.1 Surround sound when listening to online radio or watching dvd's.

On the other hand I love the speed of vista and the overall way it works, it is very nice operating system but when I use 5.1 mode I get the weirdest sound on xfi and a microphone that echo's inside games that use voip and other sound recording/morphing apps.

To better explain this I have an altec lansing 251B 5.1 surround sound setup which sounds fantastic when played thru XP x86 when combined with my XFI extreme music. When I use this great audio setup in vista I sometimes am lucky to get full 5.1 surround sound in certain apps and movies or radio stations.

Whats weird about this is, my audio normally comes out of my center and my left channels which produces a roll your eyes upsetting left fade effect.

I just dumped vista and installed XP, but I really want to use vista however I don't understand why or even how to fix 5.1 with XFI in vista. Some help would be much appreciated, because man do I notice the difference of slowness in xp now that I am back to using it. I'd prefer to use vista if I can get my 5.1 to work properly

There must be some trick with XFI and the audio control panel or even the creative panel application which I don't mind installing should I need to in order to fix it.

In vista my apps and system just responded faster and my sata transferred at 60-65mb on file copies.

Hi 08Roush- Your problem sounds like a driver issue. If you have installed the latest driver/s for your setup, there may in fact be a compatibility problem with the 64 bit OS. Posting your specific hardware here might aid further in trouble shooting. Here are a couple links I found that may help you also:

New Vista X-Fi drivers restore Dolby Digital, DTS decoding - The Tech Report

Windows Vista Help: Hardware and drivers