Creative software leftovers - ASIO error message

Question

I temporarily installed an old Creative Audigy 2 soundboard on my Vista x64 Home Premium computer. Bad idea! I uninstalled the board & all software visible on the control panel.

Now, with one particular app. (Sibelius) I keep getting a start-up message "CTASIO Warning: Creative ASIO: there are no Creative audio products installed on the system that support ASIO". I offer this as a candidate for "Most useless message", but that's beside the point.

I used a commercial registry cleaner (PC-Tools Registry Mechanic) and then edited the registry looking for "creative", "audigy" and "ASIO". After removing everything I could find, I still get the message.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I had the same problems on Win7... Although I've switched to WASAPI instead of ASIO in the meanwhile, I've found a solution to this - you need to rename or delete the file called ctasio.dll in win/system32 directory and it should stop bugging you.

Answer 2

Given that Sibelius is a notation editor, I'd put my bet on the issue being that Sibelius expects ASIO (an alternate sound framework/driver for Windows) to handle the sound output. ASIO, in turn, expects the creative sound card to use its onboard soundfonts to render the sounds.

The issue (I think) is that you removed the creative card, and so now ASIO's all confused, and rather than go back to using the regular windows sound framework, it just complains. I'd look through the menus of Sibelius (I'd find it for you, but I don't actually own the program) for things like 'sound output' or 'soundfonts', or even 'driver', etc. There, you should see an option where ASIO or CTASIO is selected. Try choosing anything else.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Check your startup entries in more detail with Sysinternals Autoruns.

This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP.

Autoruns is freeware.