The fix was relatively simple – it was all down to the cheap and nasty floppy power connector socket on the sound card – which had moved forward of the pins resulting in a partial connection.   The white plastic “socket” needs sliding back over the pins until it can not go any further – the floppy driver power cable then fits much nicer.  I’ve even put a tie-wrap around it now to prevent it sliding forward.

Oddly, the card never told me the power wasn’t connected, so I guess at least one of the pins was making contact – enough for the card to believe it had full power anyway.  I suspect this was probably the ground connection it was detecting.

The flaw with the white plastic “socket” is that it isn’t anchored to the card – so when you remove the power supply you can slide it forward of the pins without realising.  Lets hope Asus fix this in some of their updated revisions, when they come out.

A quick review of the sound card while I’m here:

Pros: It sounds very nice.  Lots of features.  DTS/DD support is nice.

Cons: Its drivers feel bloaty and it’s EAX support is not hardware, but software.  I’m also noticing some sound glitches in games which I assume is the sound cards fault again.  STALKER: Clear Sky is particularly bad when a distant gunshot is produced.  The sound card clicks in and out of its digital modes as a sound channel is created and destroyed.  Why it can’t hold the DD or DTS on I have no idea.

Summary: Nice hardware ruined by rushed drivers – typical ASUS really.

The error message I received was:

Tonight I finally fixed it!!! Hurrah!!

The problem it seemed was with my Audigy 2 drivers, I’m not sure why Stalker had such a problem with it as every other game, including some equally recent titles had no such problems.  It was pure luck I found this out, nothing I could see pointed me to a potential problem with my sound-card, the only clue I had was that a 0×1000008e error is typically a hardware driver issue.

It was this wonderful little file that fixed it all: http://support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=10581

It wanted to remove my current Audigy driver, which I let it, it then rebooted and went straight back into the installation of the new drivers, one more reboot and it was all complete.

It also looks like creative have wrapped up a nice generic Audigy driver installation, rather than having you pick out the specific model and revision of your sound-card, which never ever worked for me.  Well done creative for finally having a user-friendly driver package.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that the file I linked will update any Audigy series sound-card.

If this worked for you, please link this post or otherwise spread the word.