E6500 IMSM Driver Rollback - Help Needed

I recently got an E6500. At first, I had horrible dpc latency/crackling audio issues, which made me want to tear my hair out, since I bought it to do audio work on.

After checking these forums, I found a solution--disabled the eSata port in BIOS and kept the WiFi off. The notebook began playing nice with my M-Audio USB interface, and I was able to record and edit audio w/o problems, and all was right with the world...

Until today.

Today, I noticed the new IMSM drivers on Dell's site. Like an idiot, I installed them, believing it would give me increased stability and lower DPC latency--ha! Exactly the opposite happened.

Now DPC latency is stuck way up in the red, and my M-audio device is unusable. I can't record or edit anything. Cracklin' hell abounds.

I want to go back to the previous version of the driver.

The built-in Windows "Roll back driver" feature didn't work--it said it couldn't find the older driver on my system.

I tried downloading an older version of the driver and tried to install it, but Windows wouldn't let me, on the grounds that it was an older version.

How can I get rid of this newer driver and get back the old stable one?

 

Try by downloading the driver only. The current version. Unzip that thing. Uninstall the IMSM. That will actually also remove the driver making the system unbootable. So do nawt reboot. Then install the driver manually in the device manager specifying the folder to which you unzipped the driver before.
Worked perfectly for me. Also helped with the crackling issue.
See also this thread.

 

Having just done a fresh XP install with textmode AHCI drivers but without IMSM, I can say for sure that it is the drivers that cause the latency, not IMSM.