Ensoniq PCI Sound Card Experiences Static When Disk Is Accessed

CAUSE

This problem is caused by a regression introduced in the fix mentioned in the above article. That hotfix includes two modifications to Atapi.sys. The first modification was to flush the write cache on the disk when the system is being shut down and the second added periodic flushes of the write cache by the file system. It is this second change that is causing the problem with the sound card. Because these flushes were being done synchronously, this was tying up the PCI bus long enough to prevent the Ensoniq driver from updating the synthesizer regularly. The fix to this problem was to make the flushes asynchronous, so they would not interfere with other drivers.