Need a ton of help tracking down a Windows XP problem.

Yeah, so.

Apparently installing Battlefield 2 causes my audio and mouse to freak out.

By freak out, I mean that any sort of HDD/DVD access causes the sound and mouse to skip like crazy. So while, say, Opera is loading, and caching stuff to disk, the sound in winamp/WMP/windows itself will sort of... skip along, like it's being stretched, or, in cases of heavy access, cut out entirely (like it's clipping really hard, for audio engineer folks).

...I've no idea where to even start for this. It happens even before I reboot. Rebooting will do nothing, in fact it'll make it worse.

I'm guessing it's something to do with DirectX (bf2 forces you to install it, even if it's already there), but where/how/what do I hack apart to fix this?

Ok , just asking the obvious questions here for the sake of getting an idea of what's going on....

Did you check for worms/virusses?
Defrag your HDD recently?
Get the new drivers installed (again) for the videocard and/or soundcard?

Okay, here's the rundown.

Last week I reinstalled Windows XP, SP2.

Formatted C drive, D drive, E drive. Aside from AIM, Opera 8.5, MSN Messenger, and Winamp, I have two programs: Second Life, and now Battlefield 2.

All new drivers, including AGP, Chipset, Video, and Audio.

DirectX 9.0c.

Everything has been working fine until, oh, about 30 minutes ago.

At this point, I put the Battlefield2 DVD into the DVD drive. I clicked install. I'm listening to music at this point. Music is playing perfectly fine.

After installation, the install program automatically jumps to DirectX installation. It installs DirectX 9.0c on top of the current DirectX 9.0c installation.

After the installation is done, the sound now stutters and pops as if the PC can't handle running sound any longer.

Turning off hardware accleration of the sound chip (Ac97 onboard) does nothing. Rebooting did nothing, although now it takes about three times as long.

Reinstalling DirectX from any source (online, other cds, battlefield2 dvd) does nothing.

Hardware specs:

Pentium 4 2.6 ghz
1024 GB DDR ram
Gigabyte motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 6600 256 MB
2 physical hard drives, one external portable hard drive.
1 DVD drive.

My desires:

1) what would cause the install program to fuck up my sound drivers?
2) How do I fix this?

the Directx from the Battlefield2 DvD might be corrupt.

You mentioned reinstalling Directx from a different source , but did you also reinstall the newest sound driver after reinstalling Directx?
It's possible that Directx corrupted the driver so reinstalling the newest drivers after installing Directx doesnt hurt.

And just to check its not something EA puts in your windows registry that causes the problems ... what happens when you completely uninstall Battlefield 2?
Do you then still have these souund issues? Or are they gone then?

.... you wouldnt happen to have a SoundBlaster X-fi Fatality would you?

An uninstall of Battlefield2, and a reinstall of DirectX 9.0c and a new sound driver has done nothing.

I have an onboard AC97 sound board, which definitely isn't the culprit; it's a remarkably well-behaved onbaord soundchip.

Hmmm ok,

The reason I asked is because a lot of people with that particular soundcard had exactly the same issue you seem to have (see http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&message.id=32566 )


There is something else you can try.

Source= http://forum.eagames.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=3256&postdays=0&postorder=asc

Check that thread out , it might help you with your problem.

Yeah. A friend of mine reminded me that I've got a junky IDE cable that I need to replace; his theory is that during install BF2 got knocked off-kilter due to the shitty, half-dead cable and somehow wonked out XP.

I give up, I guess. I don't understand why this stuff breaks in the most random ways.

Gotta get it running before Secondcast records tonight anyways.

Thanks for the help

No problem , I hope you get it sorted sometime

Good luck