I sent the following to my father earlier today and I realized that it might be useful to other people:

I got some new stuff for my computer yesterday…. I got “rounded” IDE and floppy cables… They are way easier to manage than regular ribbon cables and improve airflow in the case (and look cooler). Some people at work were ordering them so I got in on the cheap bulk price… It was like $5 a cable.

In the same order I also got the little add-on board for the onboard sound on my motherboard… The add-on board gives me 2 RCA SPDIF connections (one in/one out) and 2 Optical SPDIF connections (one in/one out).. It was hard to find, and it was only $20… I removed my old SBLive! from the computer so now I have another spare sound card.. :)

When I removed the sound card, and moved the jumper for the onboard one, Windows couldn’t install the driver… It kept saying “Data is invalid”,
which is ever-so cryptic… :)

I had to search online for an hour or so, but I finally found the answer… Apparently some badly written driver installers set certain branches of the
registry to “read only”, so they can’t be modified… This would (probably) be fine if the vendor did that on “their” branch, but these badly written
installers do it to other branches (sometimes all of the branches)…

Apparently the manufacturer of my video card (Leadtek) is notorious for this.. :)

If you ever hit this the fix is here.