First I apologize if this should be in Audio. Hard to tell as the problem is only with PowerDVD, but seems related to my new sound card....

I am having a problem with PowerDVD freezing now that I have installed an Audigy 2 ZS.

It is in a Dell XPS which previously had a Dell OEM Audigy 2. I wanted the breakout box and some of the extra features so opted to install the retail zs.

I properly uninstalled the old, ran ctzapp, installed the new card and drivers and it worked fine with regular audio. However when using SPDIF out from PowerDVD (and using the creative DD decoding which is what I wanted), PowerDVD hard-freezes the system after fast forwarding, and hitting play. Or skipping a track ahead sometimes. No three finger salute working here, hard reboot.

Creative suggested trying a different PCI slot, which I did. It still freezes. You can let it just play, and it will not freeze....audio might skip a bit at first, but then seems to play through. Using software player decoding seems to work fine.

Windows media player also froze. Regular wav sounds and cd's seem fine. I am running an ATI 9800 Pro (latest drivers) with a 3ghz proc and 1gig of mem. It is an OEM Intel Mboard. DirectX 9b, dxdiag says all is fine.

I have one more PCI slot to use and try... I have 4 and nothing else plugged into PCI! First slot XP grabbed IRQ 22, now it is on 17. The sys report "says" that there is nothing else using that IRQ but I understand that over 12 it is all virtual IRQ land and hard to tell. I mean there are other IRQ's below 12 open but XP is not grabbing.

Of course I am assuming the issue is an IRQ issue. Any other suggestions from others that might have seen this issue? Bottom line I would like to be able to use SPDIF out from the player and utilize the Audigy 2 decoding and settings.

I have not upgraded to the EAX4 drivers as I do not care about EAX 4 right now, and I did not see a fix for this issue listed. Worse, I saw one post where the EAX4 driver made SPDIF out problems WORSE!!!

Thanks in advance.
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