sound card not working on dual boot after booting into linux
 

Everytime I've booted into linux then into vista, the sound card stops working. There's no sound at all. Even if I restart the pc ( when it doesn't work) it still doesn't work. I shutdown the pc then boot into windows it works again. WHY?

I had this issue before with different creative card. I'm using alsa with ubuntu 9.10.

I have had similar issues with my Audigy 2 ZS card in Debian and Mandriva, both 64 bit. I use KDE desktop in Debian and Mandriva where this has happened, so I install Kmix and go through channel settings to enable the Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack then mute it. For some reason it has to be in the mixer yet disabled. Sometimes adding, removing, muting other channels is required, playing around with a good mixer usually does it for my Audigy card.

One thing I also deduced in my experience, was that this only happened in KDE4 installations. I just re-installed the latest Debian testing build as my old installation broke when upgrading after a long period of inactivity where KDE went from 3 to 4.

I have the same thing happen with a wireless LAN card.
I don't know very much about hardware, but I suspect
that the problem has something to do with the operating
system loading some driver or code or firmware or
whatever it's called into the HW. If you reboot into
the other OS (that is perform a warm restart), that
driver or whatever stays in the HW, and it is
incompatible with the new OS, so the HW won't work.
However, if you do a COLD boot, the new OS loads its
own driver or whatever into the HW, so then it DOES
work. That's just a guess, but it must be something
like that.

Try using alsamixer to unmute the audio channels. Usually, the affected channels are 'PCM' and 'Master'; however, there was one instance that 'External Amplifier' had to be unmuted as well.

Good luck.