[ddouglass]

However with the exception of you, installing the wave editor program fixed their problems with it.
Yes it took a while for MTU to figure out what was going on with Vista and where they had to store changable files. Microsoft was not forthcoming with any information on this, so they were having to shoot in the dark and figure it out on their own. MTU is a member of the Microsoft Developers Network and everybody was having these problems.
Basically any sound card except Realtek should work. That is what MTU is trying to tell you. The USB sound that you got wouldn't happen to also be Realtek would it?
The Waveinopen: Invalid Device ID means that it can't find the sound cards ID for the recording function. Microstudio records anything you play and also can record a microphone as well. In other words the error is not within the playback (audio) but is on the recording side of this. What a Wave editor does is provide a path to that function on your sound card that may not have been set up. So you see I do know what the error is and what causes it. MTU knows too but was attacking it from a different direction which is why he said to replace it.
The key here then is whether or not either of your two sound devices have any record capability. What make/model are those two sound devices? We might be able to find the specs on them and see if they have any record functions.