Windows Vista Sound and Networking Problems

One of the mysteries of Windows Vista's lackluster networking performance has been solved. Apparently, accessing the soundcard brings the Windows Vista network connectivity down to approximately five to ten percent of your network card's nominal capacity. The cause is reputed to be Microsoft's Multimedia Class Scheduler Service, which prioritizes media applications access to the CPU. This includes such programs as Windows Media Player, Winamp, VLC, RealPlayer and many more.

This issue apparently affects all versions of Windows Vista across all platforms. Even the most modern dual core systems, boasting very high processing power, see giant slow downs in their network interface while hardly utilizing their processing power. As of this date, Microsoft has neither offered a patch nor even acknowledged the existence of this problem with Vista's network performance. This, apparently, despite the fact such innocuous activities as Window's own theme sounds can trigger the network slowdown effect. It affects both wireless (WiFi) and wired networks alike.

While this issue rarely affects broadband speeds, which are usually five to ten percent or less of network card speeds already (cards are normally 100 megabits per second with the exception of Gigabit Ethernet, which is 1000 megabits per second), it drastically slows LAN (Local Area Network) communications. For those running home media servers, such as MythTV, the effect can cripple their ability to view their own, locally streamed, content. Other applications that will see a huge speed decrease are: copying files between computers on your network, other home media servers, everyone with an extremely high speed service provider. Fun fact: In South Korea home users can purchase 64Mb/s internet connections for less than an 8Mb/s cable connection costs in most areas of the States.

Various attempts at alleviating Windows Vista's network media aversion have, as yet, met with no success. For example, modifications to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile, the registry key containing Multimedia Class Scheduler's settings have had no effect, even though this purports to control the priority given to audio playback programs on Microsoft's support site. Other changes that have been attempted include removing the 'Allow programs exclusive access to this device' property in the hardware manager, increasing network traffic priority, removing the IPv6 protocol driver, combinations of the above and many other tweaks.

Together with other Windows Vista networking problems, such as connecting file sharing and printer sharing with Windows 2000 computers, this is another blow to a Microsoft already struggling with lackluster Vista adoption.