Ever since I installed Windows 7 I've been battling with almost nightly hangs of the frontend (eshell). I could almost always Win-L to bring up the desktop and then launch task-manager to kill the eshell process. This would free up the desktop and allow me to shutdown the system gracefully or let any recording finish before I shutdown. I could however NOT restart 7MC as it would just hang before displaying the splash screen.

I figured most of this was due to buggy drivers and the fact I foolishly decided to run 64bit windows for a HTPC. Regardless I decided to wait it out and taught the wife how to restart the box. My WAF is already negative at this point...

Last night the frontend hung and I decided to just launch media player to let my wife watch a show as the box was still busy recording 2 shows and I didn't want to mess up the recordings with a restart. The only issue was that media player would play the video for a few seconds (15-90) with NO audio then hang. I tired PowerDVD 9 and it wouldn't play at all. I tried VLC and it would play the video but no audio.

On a whim I decided to uninstall the IDT drivers and check if a newer version was released since last I checked, nope. I decided to play with the default windows 7 drivers for my audio card. I had done this a few weeks earlier (can't remember why) and I soon remembered why I stopped going down that path. The default windows 7 driver install would play sound great all the way up to 7.1, 196khz @ 24 bit but it would only make weird erratic pulsating audio when viewing HD recordings. I know this has to do with the wrong timings being sent to the AMP but for the life of me I couldn't make the windows 7 default driver stick to 16bit @ 48khz.

After reading many posts and taking a shot in the dark I disabled exclusive mode access under config for HDMI. This has had several effects. First the audio sounds great for both system sounds and HD recordings. Second the system is doing 8 Channel PCM for all audio instead of streaming native audio to the AMP for decoding, at first this bothered me but I agree with the wife and think it actually sounds better. Last the system has not hung in over a week!

Net. net. I still believe this to be a buggy 64-bit driver problem but at least the system is usable and stable! I'll take this as a win as I wait for new IDT drivers to be released.

System Config and Driver Versions -

Windows 7 64-bit Pro RTM
Intel DG45ID w/E8400 @ 3Ghz
Intel X4500HD Video
8GB RAM - (4x2GB 800Mhz)
2TB - (2x1TB) RAID 0 (Intel Storage Martix)
Lite-On Blu-Ray
HD HomeRun x 2 Network Tuners

Intel X4500HD driver - v 15.15.8.64.2020
Intel DG45ID chipset driver - v 9.1.1.1025
IDT dirver - v 6224.3 v182 (*last version tried before switching to native windows 7 driver)
Intel NIC drvier - v 14.8
Intel Storage Matrix driver - v 9.5.0.1037

Hope this helps someone else.

Cheers!

Interesting you should brinbg this topic up.

I have an intel mobo with IDT audio and win 7 x64 that just kept hanging and hanging, black screening, etc. It wasnt a nicely behaved program. I got the impression that it was the audio driver fouling things up when I kept cntrl-alt-del'ing and being presented with the message "waiting for audio driver to play shutdown sound", which of course never played.

Unfortunately I wasnt able to use the default windows driver because there wasnt one.

I never tried unchecking the exclusive mode boxes, never thought of it. I did however revert back to an old XP driver and its been working great ever since.

I just read another post about someone having trouble with Sigmatel/IDT audio drivers and I did, too (also on an Intel mobo). I'm also running Win7/64 bit. I was able to get mine working OK by turning off Playback Enhancements under sound options. Intel claims that they aren't going to release any updates for their integrated audio to support Win7. I guess I've bought my last Intel mobo. I've been very happy with Asus and Gigabyte. I originally bought the Intel to try to get maximum compatibility with my first HTPC build. One alternative is to get a dedicated sound card, but it isn't much more expensive to just replace the mobo if you're up to it. I've also had a lot of problems with their integrated networking to the point where I now use a dedicated network card, too. Yep, no more Intel mobos.