Creative Labs driver fiasco

I've been suspicious of this for a while now, but never really had any proof that it was being done. Heres the situation, you have and old piece of computer hardware, say for example a sound card. Then a new version of your operating system comes out, and that hardware is no longer supported. Makes sense right? The new OS uses new space age technology that the old card just can't handle, or its too time consuming and difficult to have your software engineers write drivers for the old hardware. It totally NOT because you want to push your NEW (and usually more expensive) hardware and force people to replace a perfectly good sound card?

Well it looks like thats exactly whats going on over at Creative Labs. From what I can gather from the angry forum posts, a guy going by the name of daniel_K on the creative support forums got tired of waiting for Creative to update their drivers for Vista and did it himself. Creative then tells the guy to stop writing working drivers for Vista for products that are 'not supported'. From the creative poster: "technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended."
This appears to have been in response to him writing drivers for Creative's Audigy line of sound cards, which I own and can attest to NOT working properly in Vista.

A quote from the poster OG pretty much sums it up:
"I feel Creative saw this as an opertunity(sp) to con the consumer into believing that by adopting the Windows Vista operating system, they would be required the purchase new Creative hardware to once again be in a position to take advantage of Creatives technology and intellectual property, a blatent missuse of Creatives market position and extremely bad business practice. Creative has taken their customer base for idiots plain and simple, unfortunately for you, we're not, and incase you were any doubt of that, take a look at your finances. Its only going to get worse."

I was already fed up with Creative's support of sound drivers from years ago when I tried to get drivers for my Audigy 2 card and found that according to Creative's own driver download page, it does not exist. (searching for the model number returns nothing). I think when I build my next machine I shall be looking for a new sound card manufacturer. Personally I don't like being forced to buy new hardware when there is no reason that the older hardware should work fine. I also have been having problems with my Creative Zen player, which I have only had for 2 months... I guess its time to add CL to my list of 'do not buy' vendors. Currently the list is:
Soyo - Motherboards
Asus - Motherboards
Creative Labs - Anything