Pity no-one seems to have anything useful to offer by way of solution... on either thread.As I have RealTek audio, I tried it; plugged a jack into red Mic socket - and it didn't work - CS still crashed, as exactly same point I was just reading this topic to find a fix for my problem related to CTD using the facegen in CS. Guess what!?! This worked! I couldn't believe it. I'm refurbishing a PC that I built for my kid to use in college. There are two sets of audio ports (front and back in my case) but only one of them is actually connected. So, check and see if you have two sets of ports. BTW, I've Windows 7 64-bit with a new install of old Oblvion games. I'm still having fits with OBMM, and Wrye Bash. I've worked through most of it but it's clear that W7 is not old-game friendly. Yes, I've done all of the recommended fixes but still have some non-functional portions of OBMM (saved game utility) and Wrye-Bash (OMOD installation). So, I'll try to see if a new set of Realtek drivers is available that might fix this issue tomorrow.