yeah, my back-up script change-log is dated to april 26th and it doesn't make mention of streamci.dll. so, it was taken out of the script in may or june. i may have previously never attempted to install drivers without deleting streamci.dll first.

the streamci.dll file on my xp disc is dated to april, 2014. so, it must have been updated in one of the very last xp updates that i slipstreamed in. it might have broken something. if i can demonstrate that this is stable, i'm going to try another reinstall with an older version of streamci.dll - one that is at least as old as the drivers.

simply disabling the wdm driver produced a stable output, but it was a little flat - it didn't sound right.

the autorun in the registry is running streamci.dll as an executable and carrying out a number of commands related to the wdm and the clock. that makes perfect sense - it's the class installer. but, that seems to be what's screwing it up. and, it's still the clock. and still windows, like i thought at the very start...

streamci.dll was also in my initial delete script, but i took it out a while back because i'd get "missing or corrupt" errors on the first boot after a driver reinstall. i can't date this, but it's not that long ago. april, maybe, even. i can see now why that is. but, in the past, that means the autorun didn't actually execute - because the dll wasn't there.

so, i tried reinstalling the drivers with the streamci.dll deleted and the autoruns removed (i'd just get the error if they were there...) and it seems to be stable.

no, it seems like it's a driver conflict after all. the driver that's in conflict?

itself.

might explain why it didn't want to isolate...

the mixer loads two drivers: one for direct access, one over "wdm". i'm almost certain that the final solution, for now, is to disable the wdm driver.

the wdm driver is being used to playback final mixes over foobar, and i would absolutely like to resolve the concern. it wasn't like this before. but it seems to be a registry add.

if i uninstall and reinstall the drivers, it will be stable after the first reboot and gets funny on the second. some values are added to the registry on start-up. this seems to be the actual cause.

for now, i'm not worried about fixing the wdm streaming. i'll just leave it off when i get back to it. when i wake up...

but, again: it's bizarre, difficult to isolate for problems, one after another.