But first, a little history... Apparently MS has disabled direct sound with the advent of Vista and so most Creative Labs sound cards of old are now hindered.
Ah, but not so much. Creative has found a way to keep direct sound. First, download the latest driver from creative for your windows 7 installation. Next, download the lastest version of Creative Alchemy, it is a program designed to re-enable EAX. Also make sure that GW is properly updated but closed. Install the drivers and alchemy software and restart as indicated.
Before loading GW, in the start menu go to "all programs" and to either "games" or "guild wars" depending on where you normally launch GW from. Right click on the GW icon and go to Properties. Under shortcut you'll see the target path of the icon. Outside the quotation mark at the end of the line add a space then -dsound as follows
"drive letter:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -dsound
Next, go to the Compatibility tab. Select a Windows XP option from the drop down, I think any would do. Then click on OK. Your setting here are now saved.
Next, launch Alchemy. It should also be in your All Programs menu under Creative. Once launched it should automatically detect that GW is installed and offer it on the left hand column. Select it and click the arrows to bring it to the right. That's it.
Thanks to a comment below by Anonymous, I realized that not all computers will automatically find Guild Wars. I know very little on this, but I at least have a screenshot for what Alchemy found for the location of GW on my machine. If Alchemy does not find GW you might check for a similar path as mine, or your GW installation is so non-standard that it might even be damaged. I have GW on a separate drive from the OS on my system and still had no issues with this.
Launch GW and on the login screen you can select options. Go to sound and check to see if it worked by clicking the boxes for Use 3D Audio Hardware and Use EAX.
If they are both greyed out, then you didn't set Alchemy correctly or you didn't set compatibility. If Use 3D Audio is able to be checked but Use EAX is not, then you didn't add the flag -dsound correctly, go back and fix it. That's it, these steps should ensure that GW and EAX work.
