I am having problems with the C-Media onboard sound on my system when using FS2002. The programme continually locks up, and after trying many workrounds have decided that the C-Media is the cause.When I don't use sound when flying (switching it off via the menu in FS or by disabling it in the control panel), everthing is OK. But as soon as sound is enabled, the programme locks up after a few minutes, and I have to reboot the computer. I have tried shutting down all background programms running, updating the driver but with no luck. Would it be any help fitting a sound card instead of having the onboard type. I am sure one of you computer pros might be able to help. I am running an Athlon 1600, with 256 meg and an NVidea graphics card and XP Home.Please help if you can as my VA is gonna sack me soon if I dont do some flying,Cheers

Try also updating the latest VIA 4 in 1 chipset drivers.I have onboard C-Media on an Asus Pentium-4 board and have no problems.

I have an onboard C-Media card and had no problems with fs. (Similar setup as yours except 512 megs of ram). I have, however, disabled it and gone with a Creative SB Audigy card simply because there was no bass/treble, etc., settings with the C-media setup.It's got to be something amiss with the drivers you have installed, but hard to tell what.Darrell

Which C-media device are you using? I have the C-media 8738 on two Soyo Dragon+ MOBOs. I have them dual booted with Win98SE/WinXP. When I first installed drivers for this device, the Win98SE side was using the VXD drivers and caused a lot of pops and scratching. I since downloaded the unified driver, that supports Win98/ME/XP, and the pops and scratching ceased. I have never had the sound cause lockups.If by any chance you have this MOBO and chipset, then download the drivers from www.soyousa.com . If you don't have the MOBO but have the chipset, download the latest drivers from www.cmedia.com.tw. You can also checkout the other chipset n the C-media website.

Thanks for the replys. Still no luck though. I think I will have to do a complete re-install of xp and fs as it worked ok once. I think I may have installed something that is causing the problem, but what I dont know.

I have had two MOBO's with C-Media built in sound and I have experience ongoing problems with both Flight Simming and other apps. You just have to make sure you have the latest drivers for both your MOBO (Via chipset I assume) and for the C-media sound chipset itself AND also if there are bundled sound software programs(i.e. Mixers, Players, Recorders) make sure you have the latest updates for those also.On my current MOBO, an Iwill KK266, the bundled Mixer software that came on the MOBO CD caused the whole system to hiccup every 4 seconds whether running the Flight Sim or not. I wacked a few CD-R's before I figured out it was the Mixer software causing the problem.The way I figured out that it was the Mixer was when I started using "Enditall" before running the Flight Sim. I noticed the system stopped hiccuping after running "Enditall". So I ran "Enditall" multiple times having it only shut down one program each time until shutting down the Mixer made the hiccuping go away. I downloaded and installed the latest C-Media drivers which included the Updated Mixer software and the problem went away for good.Hope this helps,Sskoup

Though very rare, another thing you might want to check is addin cards in your pc. Are you using any extra cards like videoediting, modem, networkcard etc.? If so, then you can try to install the card(s) in another PCI slot. Strange sound effects can be a result of the audio chip (being onboard or addin) sharing it's IRQ with another heavy usage card. If FS2002 is the only 'game' (sorry ;-) ) causing audio problems, then I would say it is definately not a driver/software issue. Check your motherboard manual to find out which PCI slots are sharing their IRQ.