Alchemy came with the latest driver package so I didn't feel that applying it separately would do any better. In any case, this appears to be a main driver issue since all other aspects of the card's operation are just fine, 3D sound and all. I simply lost the AUX input, even though its slider is there and is unmuted. Now I have no place to feed my MIDI sound from my Sound Canvas module back through the system. I don't know what other Creative cards I can buy locally, but I still have no way of knowing if they too might suffer the same effect of losing an input or whatever, not to mention that the 3 plug setup (from Creative) will still work with one of those other cards. (Titanium, Fatal1ty, or whatever)