Vista - WMP/WMC causing system to freeze when playing audio

Hey all, I'm having a frustrating week. I installed a barand new Phenom II 940 a few nights ago, and this screwed up my DRM files for my TV card and Media Center, story short, I wound up formatting and reinstalling.

But now I have an even more frustrating problem. When I use Media Player, or Media Center to play aufio files, or streaming audio, the whole system progressivly locks up, sound stops, dwm becomes unresponsive, and finally a little later the mouse finally freezes. there's no blue screen, no reboot, no nothing but a complete deafening silence that something has horribly failed.

All my drivers are up to date, system specs are as follows:
Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 (AMD NB770/SB600)
AMD Phenom II 940 (Stock settings ...unfortunatly)
4x2GB G.Skill PC8000
eVGA 8800GT
Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Music
Avermedia m780 TV tuner
2xSeagate 7200.10 RAID0 SATA2 AHCI NCQ
1xSeagate 7200.9 JBOD AHCI NCQ
1xSeagate 7200.7 PATA

All being governed by Windows Vista Ultimate x64

As I said, prior to this reinstall, no problems, I reinstalled Vista last night, everything was back up to date, and that probelm started, this afternoon I reinstalled again! everything back up to date.....problem didn't go away.

There's no way I can blame the CPU for this, it seems to software oriented an error for that, I would thing the CPU would rather splash me a BSOD before just progressivly freezing everything.

Anyway, any help/thoughts are much Appreicated
-Chris

Have you checked in system processes if Audiodg.exe is eating away your memory when this happens?

I have, and it is not. RAm and CPu are normal and unphased.

I did however, swap over to onboard audio, Realtek. I' still cooking right along, so I think it may vvery well be with the latest Creative drivers, can't say I'm to surprised by that, but I'm not entirely sold on that.

well I had the same problems with latest creative drivers (tho for me it was audiodg.exe that was the cause) I fixed this by disabling any special effects that my X-fi Fatal1ty added to the sound.

check if it helps.. (adding *possibly* helpful screenshot )

Ok, I'll give that a shot, I don't think I ever disabled that as it hadn't been a problem in the past. I'll post back with the results. Because I really do like having full DTS/Dolby again, sounded better then Daniel_Ks driver pack.

Unfortunatly that did not resolve the issue, it still froze up.


This is going from mildly annoying to moderatly irritating. Only Creative...Only.

well, I have vista 64 bit, a "creative x-fi xtreme gamer fatal1ty pro", a pehnom 9850 and the rest is unimportant. I also am listening to music, usually while browsing the internet an tehn it suddenly all freezes incuding sound. I can sometimes move the mouse for a while before that stops working too. i listen to music on media player also.
I don't know how to fix the problem

This sounds like DRM coming into play. I think what happened is that all your stuff was coded to your other system (yes changing the mobo/cpu will count as a new sys) and now you changed it and its freaking out. Try downloading and playing (or ripping) a new song.

~Lordbob

drm???? why would that be? you say that just by listening to my songs they got messed up? lol

Well, I don't know the details, but I remember another post about that I think...

Did you try getting a new song?

~Lordbob