I remember 3 years ago when a couple of gamse came out where the sound was buggy as hell with X-Fi cards, turned out the newest drivers that were released the week couldn't didn't like the codec (prior ones had run fine in the BETA test), that took 18 months before X-Fi cards got updated to accept it again and some are still buggy with other hardware setups
Of course, in the world of the keyboard warrior it was of course the developers fault that features they had tested worked till the driver update and now didn't work
If the on board is really that chronic then it might be worth trying to dig up an older sound card 'short term'? The full scale release should see a splurt in better driver/software support, or at least I hope so