this may turn out to be a lot more trivial than i thought.

i've started from the absolute beginning: i'm not even installing chipset or video card drivers. the soundblaster drivers are on the install disc.

when it first comes up, before installing anything further at all whatsoever, it's a little trebly sounding. i recognize this as the way it sounds when it's broken. a reboot brings back the same cut highs i've been fighting with for weeks.

first, i tried to break the plug & play and this did work - until i re-opened foobar. what? how? so, i deleted the config file in foobar. it went back to a clean sound - until i re-opened it again.

this is the only thing i've found, up to this point, that consistently creates and recreates the issue. could it just be a corrupt setting in the foobar configuration file? could it be that easy?

see, here's the thing: essentially everything i've done up to this point forces me to reset the driver in foobar. breaking the plug & play, reinstalling the drivers, etc all has the step of repointing foobar to the right driver. meaning i'm always resetting the configurations.

what's interesting to me is that this is basically the same type of error that i'm getting in cubase: something is saving incorrectly, or loading incorrectly on the save. could there be an underlying issue at the root of both? if so, it's not ram, because i got it on the other machine, too.

i'm going to slowly continue the reinstall and see if this remains constant.

the only thing i can think of is that when i installed the vanilla xp on the pentium III, it was a version that had been slipstreamed up to the end of the product cycle. i guess that takes me back to the idea that i need to remove something from the xp install - that an update has broken something fairly central. if i get to the end of the install process and am face-to-face with something as trivial as this, i'll have to start from scratch with my sp1 disc and slowly move forwards, service pack by service pack, until i get to the problem.