<< fant: huh? isn't that exactly what I said?
If you scroll back, you'll see many people trying to use this setup with WinXP were having lots of problems. I was telling them how to work around the problems. >>
Umm... monty, I believe you said to ONLY plug in the green connector cable. To use true 4-channel sound with SBLive cards, you need to plug in BOTH the GREEN and BLACK connector cables into the SBLive card, just as fant said. The GREEN is for the front stereo channels and the BLACK is for the rear stereo channels. You do need to enable '4-speakers' in the speaker setup in AudioHQ. Run the speaker test to make sure you have 4 discrete channels, and are not just duplicating the fronts to the rears, as it seems like monty is doing by only hooking up one cable.
In addition, any other source not tied directly to the sound card or system (ie. digital sources and MIDI, wav playback are 4-speakers) will not default to '4-speaker' mode even if you have it set that way. Inputs such as Aux (and analog CD, mic input, etc) for some reason don't get fed to all 4 speakers unless you set them as the record device in the Mixer. The top row of input icons are what give you 4 speakers by default... click on the icon in the bottom row to set the record device and enable 4 speakers on that input. Note that this is just duplicating the fronts and rears again. However, if you enable some pseudo-surround mode, like CMSS from Creative, or the M3D on the speakers themselves, you should get all 4 speakers running. Because of the way the algorithms work, the rear channels may in fact sound a bit more 'muffled' if you listen to them directly. This is perfectly normal and is a result of extrapolating 4-channel information from a 2-channel source. Note that if you are watching DVDs or playing games that support discrete 4-channel sound, you don't want to enable those surround enhancement modes.