When I visited there, I was told that there is a new driver for the Sound card, the Creative AudioPCI ES1371,ES1373 (WDM). So I let Windows install it.

This completely disabled the sound coming from Windows. I looked at the Sounds and Audio Device Properties in the VM, and it indicated on the Volume tab that there were no audio devices. The speaker icon was also missing in the Windows taskbar. Oddly enough, Windows really thought that my audio hardware was working properly.

I noticed the file date was 3/18/2008 for the new driver, and it was version 6.0.0.0. After fiddling with a few things, here is how I fixed it:

I went into Device Manager and selected the Creative device. I then chose the driver tab and chose update driver. I told it to install advanced, and "don't search. I will chose the driver to install."

On the next page, there were two (identical) drivers listed. The bottom one is the old one. So I selected the bottom file, and now audio works!

I am back to Driver date: 7/1/2001 and Version 5.1.2535.0 (the original). I guess the latest Creative Labs driver won't work with VM Ware.

When in doubt, look for the es1371mp.sys file in your system directories if you get stuck and you need to know where Windows sticks their unused driver files.

But since VMWare chose to use this as their virtual hardware, it would be nice if it was compatible with the real one.

Also, I noticed that essentially everything VMWare now installs is a USB device listed under the "safely remove hardware" object. Not too useful. Perhaps they could make all of those things stop appearing there. It doesn't seem like it is toouseful to ever remove any of those USB devices, as it seems to confuse Fusion if not Windows.