Soundcard specialist Creative has been marketing its sound-related products as "Vista Ready" since the release of the new operating system from Microsoft. However, things are not quite exactly true, and many of the company's customers have fallen for this "misunderstanding".

The issue relies in the Windows Vista sound drivers the Creative engineers have written. However, the code comes crippled in the Vista drivers, although they used to work fine in the previous version of the operating system.

According to Creative, the Vista drivers are not able to decode Dolby Digital, DTS signals and DVD-Audio, and the slow update cycle of less than one drive per year pushed its customers to take the matter into their own hands.

One of Creative's customers, known as Daniel_K, recently released an updated unofficial driver that came with all the previously crippled features, and some extra goodies on top. For decades, high-end products would function with tweaked-out drives, and despite the fact that the practice was not condoned by companies, no one would take extreme measures to take the "unofficial" software down.

Creative decided that it's high time to stop the distribution of the modded Vista drivers for its soundcards, and even threatened Daniel_K with a legal action. The cease-and-desist notice was posted by Phil O'Shaughnessy, vice president of Corporate Communications at Creative on the company's forum.

"We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards," he wrote in the cease-and-desist post.

O'Shaughnessy continued by accusing the modder of intellectual fraud. "By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make," he added.

Creative's actions triggered a wave of protests on the same forum thread. Many of the users even suggested a boycott, and threatened with them never purchasing new Creative hardware again. The company is already fighting bad sales from sound cards, and the advent of Asustek on the upper-mid-range soundcard market will make things even worse.