I’m using Vista Home Edition and for some reason the volume control speaker icon isn’t in the system tray. It was a couple days ago and I don’t know what happened. I tried right click>properties>notification area>system icons but the “Volume” is grayed out. I’ve looked everywhere for a solution but I guess I’ve been looking in all the wrong places. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.Edit: Ok, I fixed the grayed out problem but now sometimes it pops up that a driver failed but was able to restart itself. I can’t remember exactly what it said (it goes away too fast). My screen goes blank for a few seconds then that alert pops up. No idea what to do about that.

I have an expensive motherboard (ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe) with 5.1 sound (Realtek AC’97) IO on the back panel and an internal 10 pin (with 2 pins missing) AC’97 header to which I should be able to attach the AC’97 lead from my case’s front panel headphone + mic sockets.However, when I plug in the internal header, I lose the front left and right speakers from my 5.1 back panel socket (without getting it out the front socket either). I assume this is something to do with the way vista has only one “speakers” thing in control panel’s “sound” thing and how it detects if things are unplugged. The only way I have been able to get the back panel sound back has been to unplug the front panel from the internal IO header.

Does anyone know how to fix this so that I can use both the front panel (headphones) and back panel (speakers) without turning my computer off to attach a lead to the motherboard?

I’m tired of creative not releasing good drivers for Vista (32-bit, i know this is vistax64, but its the best vista forum i know of). The problem is that Creative is the only sound card manufacturer that I know of. Could someone please reccomend a different company that has good vista drivers?I’m looking for a card/usb that had fiber optic 5.1 support on vista 32-bit.