I installed the latest Creative drivers (via LiveDrvPack.exe, Ver.1.10.21 of 17-7-2002) for my Soundblaster Live 5.1 on my system with specs:AMD 1700+ xp CPUAsus A7V266-E motherboard using Via 4in1 drivers Ver. 4.44 Windows XP Professional (with all Windows updates)DirectX ver. 8.1bGeforce 3 using Detonator drivers Ver. 29.42I tested the new drivers in games like IL2, F4-SP3 and of course FS2K2, among other. I found the sound (especially spatial (EAX) sound) clearer with the new Creative drivers than with the old ones. Not to speak of the improved UI for the Audio tools.However, with the latest 1.10.21 drivers, I noticed that FS2002 had problems with sound, especially for the piston engine sound like the one of the Cessna 182. At full throttle, the sound started to have cracks and rumbles in it, like I was virtually flying an old Cessna. After several minutes, this became unacceptable.Previously, I had the 2nd revision drivers from Creative (from dec 19 2001) installed. These drivers gave gave smooth sound effects for FS2K2. This is what I did to trace the problem that lead to the latest SBL drivers:- I installed an image of my Windows XP partition with the old driver setup (I had no backup of the old drivers to restore the sytem, and neither could Windows..). I was back to no sound cracking in FS2002.- Then I installed the new drivers again, and the cracking was introduced in FS2002.- In the meantime, no system settings were changed except for the driver installation.Does anyone else experience this problem with these drivers? This may be off-topic here, but is a work-around available to stop the cracking in FS2002, by for instance tweaking some BIOS settings (e.g. latency time, motherboard sound chipsets settings (are switched off, as far as I know) etc.)?In the meantime I'd better stick with the old drivers and wait for a fix from Creative.Cheers,David

You are not alone. I found the same problem as you. I'm not aware of a workaround or fix at this time.

Same here. If you search Creative's knowledgebase for 'crackling' you will find some tips but I haven't tried any of them. I may just go back to the older drivers.A lot of people reported this problem with the older drivers but say that the new ones fixed it. I have had just the opposite experience. Strange.Here is a link to the KB article:http://www.americas.creative.com/support/k...404&Centric=108Please report here if you figure anything out.