its definetly not the soundblaster, i have 2 boxes here, originally i was using the motherboard's onboard sound, which , while playing the games, wud stutter/loop, i tried Blackthorn on the 2nd machine which had the soundblaster installed, (p2 400 512ram, 32mb geforce, sblaster, dx7.0 , win2ksp1) and it worked fine, if not a bit slow. So i took the soundblaster out, turned off the onboard sound, stuck in the soundblaster, and the sounds still looped. In response to the 2nd post, it was a completely fresh install on win2k. reformated,fdisked the lot.