sound in vista

So I finally installed Vista to give it a go. And so far the only really annoying problem I ran in to is my sound. I use the onboard Realtek AC'97 codec and have the utility from the website. In XP I was able to have it outputting 5.1 analog and optical SPDIF simultaneously. But in Vista it is one or the other and that is really annoying. I frequently switch between the outputs depending on what I am doing and having to manually switch it through the driver is just really aggravating. Is there a hotfix or something?

Vista sucks when it comes to sound.

Vista has the POTENTIAL of beign good at sound...

Unfortunately if you want to do advanced sound functions. It SUCKS!

Soundblaster X-Fi is having a horrible time at incorporating its EAX 5.0 standard, and PowerDVD is also having problems.

Media Player is a complete computer Cycle Sucker. It spawns this DRM thread that takes upwords of 15% of one core of my Duel X6800 which is overclocked. I wish I could remove this nightmare.

Windows Media Center doesn't seem to share this horrible fate, and is a great improvement over XP MCE.

Is there any sign M$ will make some changes to vista/media player to accommodate more complex sound systems?

I had issues with eax with vista also on a audigy 2 zs, it wouldnt output 5.1 correctly, once i disabled eax I had 5.1 channles in games. I dont know the answer for the spdif issue though as I only switched from USB to external reciever, USB headset and the audigy 2zs.

I've found that Vista has better quality sound, you just have to work around the massive amounts of driver bugs that deal directly with sound.