Hi all! As an introduction to my issue I present to you my system: WindowsXP Pro SP1, all patches/updates, DX9.1, nVidia 2.03 driverset for nForce2 chipset including onboard sound, ATI Catalyst 3.1 drivers for my ATI 9500Pro, latest BIOS 1002 fom Asus for the A7N8X and an Athlon XP 2600+/333. I am not overclocking anything. Onboard 3Com networkcard disabled, onboard nVidia networkcard enabled. Very often I notice a sound disturbance, espcially when switching back to FS2002 from an external addon program (AcitveSky wxRE). In fact is does not sound like a disturbance. It is more like all volume sliders are set to max until FS2002 is 'fully active' again. This is quite annoying as each time I switch back to FS (the sim is not paused) I wakeup again from the loud noise ;-) . During flight this also happens sometimes (so without switching from/to FS2002), but only for a fraction of a second. I checked my IRQ/resource sharing as I expected a sharing conflict between sound/video. No problem here. I've tried playing around with hardware acceleration settings for sound/video, no luck. Is anybody else experiencing this on the Asus A7N8X board? Is there anyone out there with a good suggestion? I only notice this symptom in FS2002. Other games (forgive me for this classification :-)) are fine...Thanks as always!Hakkie

hakkie, I may the one you look for ;-)I have the same board with the onboard soundforge chip and notice distorted sounds when flying with wxRE on (not the peaks you mentioned). damian just told me in the aktivesky forum to set fs2002's priority to high using the windows taskmanager. He says that too many addons may slow down sound processing. well, I somehow doubt this but is it a try.CheersPhilCome to DAD!http://www.dangerous-airports.com/images/dad_logo.jpg

Thanks Phil, I'll give that a try.

Hi Hakkie,I have the same board and almost updated every updateble driver. I have the same problem as you have. However, this also occured when I had my previous board for a Pentium 3. So I believe it is not the board but something between FS and XP. Even microsoft does not understand itself anylonger... :-)

It happens to my K6-400 machine and my Athlon 1.2GHz machine also. I usually fly with AOL Instant Messenger running, and switching back and forth causes the ear-shattering "blast". Usually a click on a menu fixes it, but its still annoying. I have a ESS AudioDrive ES1938 (old) soundcard in both comps. I thought it was that card causing it, but I guess not now. It also happened in Win2k too, so XP isnt to blame here.

@Ferry: Does your last sentence implicate that you have been in contact with Microsoft about this sound issue? Could it be helpfull that I also inform them so they know it's not just one customer?Hakkie

I have a similar issue which has occured with FS2002, Grand PRix 4 and Ghost Recon.Only happens occasionally though.