Creative Labs
May I be the first to say:
Thank you for finally responding. 
It may be the beginning of repairing Creative's unfathomably huge PR snafu. Hopefully you guys can pull this one off, starting with this thread. If you can actually take this and turn the whole company around with it, I'm sure many Creative swear-offers may once again return to your products. By turning around, I mean:
- Quit crippling hardware with bad (or intentionally bad) software. Yes, other companies (like nVidia, Intel, AMD, etc...) do this to maintain low production cost, but when it does work, it works well, and their products are branded as "lower priced alternatives". Everyone's seen unpopulated component pads on hardware boards, which entices people to want to buy the full featured version. But doing it between operating systems is absolutely ridiculous!
- Support the driver community. Drivers drive hardware. No drivers, no hardware! Concentrate as much effort on your drivers as you do your excellent hardware, and you will have a high quality product once again. I still love that the old ISA Sound Blasters often had built-in speaker amplifiers. That's a mark of quality and creativity. Hopefully you can do it again!
- Rethink your corporate strategy. Everyone now knows about Creative's history of buying up companies to stifle competition... you've got to quit that stuff. It may give you more capital, but doing it in a Microsoftian fashion is just bound to get you bad press that your company isn't Microsoft-sized enough to handle. Again.
- While Windows Vista may be the worst operating system in existence, that in no way gives you the right to refuse support on older hardware when it's darn well capable of being supported. nVidia and ATI are shining examples of this - they still support their most ancient of hardware in the newest operating systems. That's what's given me the ability to put nLitened versions of Windows XP on darn near every computer I come across, and make it run better than ever. You need to quit spewing out excuses and start spewing out working drivers.
- And for crying out loud, your driver self extractor is atrocious. It doesn't need to rattle off the CRC as it computes each byte. I can't be the only person that is annoyed by that 
With that, let's see the news flow right on in.
While this addresses one issue, it certainly doesn't touch on the fact that Creative has admitted to intentionally crippling people's hardware. This little bit of plattitude is way too little too late in my book. If, after four days, this is the best that the company can come up with after admitting to ripping their users off by giving them intentionally reduced usability AND not providing the features that they have said they are providing?
A little apology doesn't cover consumer fraud. This whole affair has exposed more about Creative than I would ever have thought possible.
I'm STILL going to encourage people to NOT purcahse creative merchandise until something better is offered up from the corporate mouthpieces.
