I've been flying MS Flight Simulator (2004) via keyboard for too long.  Thanks to a local freecycler, I picked up a yoke (w/throttle) for just the cost of a quick drive out to Delta.  Unfortunately, I then found out that my PC didn't have a gameport!  I *thought* it did, but hadn't bothered to check!  Luckily, around the same time, I also picked up a used PC from one of the guys I used to work with back in the Service Spring days.

Today I finally got around to pulling the PCI combo card out of that box and throwing it into my PC.  The card is a Conexant Riptide, and has a modem, sound, and gameport all bundled onto one.  As soon as I plugged it in and turned on my PC, it was detected and started working.  A quick configure of the flight yoke and I was off and flying!  Then, I went ahead, shutdown, closed up the case, put everything back in place, and tried it again...  Got the dreaded installing hardware, but drivers can't be found errors!  Flight controller wasn't recognized, sound was down, modem was out!  Manually re-installed the Windows (included) drivers, but no go.  Tried searching on-line for new drivers, but the XP drivers are the latest.

Very frustrating and just like the TV tuner card problem that one of the guys at DoX Systems has been having.  It works fine the FIRST time you plug it in, then it fails on subsequent boots!  I didn't want to have to pull the card and move it between slots everytime I wanted to play MSFS, so I spent much time troubleshooting.  I finally found that the card works fine if the audio header is removed.  As soon as the header is plugged in, the driver issue comes back when the computer is restarted!  No idea HOW having an audio header hanging off of it would cause the Windows driver process to fail, but there you have it...  If you use a Riptide card to drive a flight yoke, do NOT install the audio header!