Hi, okay, searched and searched and I can't find this anywhere.

I have just installed litestep, done the config files so everything is how I like it (using the default theme, still, but I've used Litestep before and this happened with all themes), so, anyway, there's this problem which is REALLY annoying me. When I try and change the volume via the volume control in the system tray, the volume control crashes and quits... thats all there is to it, unless I go to the control panel I have no way of changing the volume, and I need to change volume ALOT (don't want to go tone deaf...).

There's more to it though, I have an Audigy 2 sound card, and it installs its very own special volume control, it looks a little fancier, and it shows the percentage you have it at (handy), also when you double click it you go into the sound card's control panel.

So, ANYWAY, once the volume control crashes, I can put the original system one back in via the control panel (selecting it to not appear in the system tray, apply, selecting it to appear again) and I get the original volume control back, which doesn't crash.

So, I was just wondering. Can someone help me please? Is this a known problem? ALSO, if there is no way to fix it, does anyone know if there is a way to stop creative's special volume control from being loaded instead of the original window's one at startup?

Any help most appreciated :) .

Try to differentiate between youre sound card drivers and the sound card GUI you might whant to remove the GUI and leave the drivers, same as with video drivers and video GUI or keyboard drives and keyboard GIU.
"If you have the installation disk (just in case)"Normally the easiest way to do this is go to add and remove programs and remove the sound card software then restart and let the pc detect the hardware and only the drivers will be installed.
And your prob will go away together with the waisted resourses.

Darn tootin!

Thanks for the help, but it didn't work, which is odd, cos it should, right? Uninstalling all the guff apart from the drivers took away all the guff apart from the volume control bit :| .

Anyway, thanks again, if anyone has any more ideas they'd be most appreciated!

Check your startup items, there may be an entry for the custom volume control.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/autoruns.shtml

Hi, thanks a bunch! :D

Yup, I found it, and interestingly, once the creative volume control thingy crashes, if I go and start it up again (from the location I found with that utility), it works perfectly fine...

Anyhoo, I guess I have to find out how to stop it being a startup item... ... ... why oh why does microsoft copy silly things off apple and yet not usefull things such as the Mac's way of controlling startup items? :| Bah!

Anyhoo, thanks again! :)

The utility I linked to allows you to uncheck or simply delete startup entries, so you should be able to make it quit loading, by doing as much.

But, since you said it works when you ran the program manually, then we need to look into this further to make sure it isn't a bug in the shell loading the startup items at the wrong time. Could you please respond and let us know what startup key the volume item was being ran from? Thanks.

The other possibility is that you ran it through an explorer window, and it depends on explorer. Could you test running it without any explorer items loaded? So via a hotkey or something? Thanks.

Hi, thanks, sorry for being dopey about simply unchecking it!

Yeah, turns out its reliant on explorer or something, I tried running it from dos/command prompt and it nowt work! But explorer did, so I guess there's your answer!

Anyhoo, thanks again, appreciate it :) .

What version of windows are you running? What version of the Audigy 2 software is installed? I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this previously, if it is indeed a common bug. Have you tried upgrading to the latest drivers?

Could you also double check that it consistently works when a explorer file manager is open, but crashes when an explorer window is not open?