I'm playing on my Vista 64 laptop for the second time and part way through the game the sound has degraded so that it's very rough and scratchy sounding.

My sound card is HDAudio. I don't know much about it, other than that is what is identified when I run dxdiag.

I had hoped that if I changed the hardware acceleration setting it might improve, but it seems I can't change that in Vista the way I could in XP.

Anyone have any ideas about this? Anything I can do? Otherwise the game runs perfectly, as usual. It's just the sound is awful.

This started happening to me when I was experimenting with FXAA, vertical sync and other forced GPU settings, which leads me to believe it is not necessarily related to your sound chipset but rather how the game engine is processed. I'm currently running the game without VSync and I have not suffered the bizarre rapidly stuttering and scratchy sound that makes all voices sound deep and monotone (more than usual, that is!) using that setting, though I'm not sure it was actually contributing to the problem.

Another suggestion of mine if you have an Intel processor, is to disable SpeedStep on your motherboard. It is some kind of setting that dynamically changes your CPU clock frequency and it often messes up older games for me, usually by making them play out at about 1000 frames per second which is like watching a fast-forwarded video, or the game refuses to launch thinking I'm trying to start it with a 15mhz processor.

I wouldn't be able to do any of those things ( no clue).

I did read that you can fix problems associated with dual core processors by using the Set Affinity command in the Task Manager, but Vista will not allow me to do this, so I guess I'm hooped.

The thing that bothers me is that the sound was fine and then it just wasn't, all of a sudden, while I was in the game.

Well, it seems I can have 32 bit colour or sound. Good old Vista, not letting me decide what to do with my own computer. I guess I'll try compatibility mode ads see if that helps.